Feed the Rain
by Born-Of-Elven-Blood
Summary: "You are my rain..." She knows there is no such thing as ghosts. And she doesn't believe in magic. Nor does she believe that the invasion of New York had anything to do with her. One stormy night Jane will begin to discover just how wrong she has been about a great many things. [Loki x Jane]
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer**: The characters and original story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do not belong to me; this story is not for sale or profit.

**A/N**: So I have fallen head first into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and my new obsession is Loki/Jane. Why must I always give the nerdy heroine to the smart-mouthed villain? It's a sickness – but one we can all enjoy! This is the first Lokane fic I have finished, so yay! *confetti* I told the muse this was supposed to be a one shot, but the precocious little bastard never listens to me (I already have two sequels outlined, and an idea for a third… yeah). So just FYI, this story is completed, I'm merely putting some finishing touches on the other chapters, and updates shall be forthcoming soon.

This story was first inspired by a beautiful piece of fanart by Selene on Tumblr; please visit my profile to find the link to it!

So, without further ado, please enjoy:

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_**Feed the Rain**_

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_**Don't walk away when the world is burning  
Come feed the rain  
Because I'm thirsty for your love  
Dancing underneath the skies of lust**  
-Poets of the Fall_

* * *

The skies over Manhattan rumbled ominously, and Jane felt the first cool raindrop splash against her forehead. Pulling the collar of her jacket closer, she picked up her pace, weaving through the pedestrian traffic, not wishing to get caught in the promised downpour. The weather forecast called for storms all night long.

Thor probably could have done something about it if he'd been there, but he was still in Britain helping with the clean-up and rebuilding efforts; it had only been a few weeks since the Convergence, and with his help Greenwich was already in better shape than Manhattan a full year after its alien attack. Jane would have liked to be there with him, but in the wake of the second alien invasion in as many years, the world's political and scientific leaders had questions, and she and Eric were the ones best equipped to answer them. Since Eric's recent hospitalization made him, in their vaunted opinions, a less than reliable source, she was, somewhat unbelievably, tapped as the world's foremost expert on the Convergence phenomenon.

Tony Stark had hosted the conference of top scientists and global security experts at Stark Tower, which was still in the process of being rebuilt, even though over a year had passed since the Chitauri attack; and it was at least fully functional, whereas the rest of the city seemed held together with scaffolding and duct tape. The New York skyline was still littered with cranes and the jagged thrusts of shattered buildings. Television reports had not done justice to the scale of the destruction.

Jane was just glad that SHIELD had not had their way; she would not have set foot in the Triskelion for all the gold on Asgard; there was just no trusting them, no matter how much Thor talked about them as "allies". Perhaps especially because of that: every time Thor and SHIELD crossed paths, she ended up being manipulated, managed and outright lied to. At least this time she was fairly sure she had escaped their notice unscathed, though she couldn't say she liked the fact that she'd just spent the past two weeks of her life explaining gravitational anomalies and quantum time-space convergence theory to Nick Fury's eye patch. But it had been worth it to meet Tony Stark and Dr. Bruce Banner. The idea that geniuses like these were listening to her, Jane Foster, the former laughing-stock of the scientific community, was beyond her wildest dreams. A petty little part of her wanted badly to call up her ex, Don, shout "so there!" in his ear and hang up on him.

Today had been the last day of the conference; everyone claimed they were up to speed on the pertinent information surrounding the incident (though Steve Rogers had still looked a little cross-eyed by the end of the last session), and Jane's part in it was now done; it was time for all the powers that be to decide what to 'do' about it. Jane found this a rather pointless overreaction, since the threat was already past; she and Thor, along with Eric, Darcy and Ian had already 'done' it all for them.

_And Loki…_ her mind whispered.

Cringing inwardly, Jane drew her collar even closer and picked up her pace. Ever since she'd arrived she'd been struggling not to think of Thor's dead brother. Surrounded on all sides by the city he had destroyed, it was next to impossible.

Scenes from the recent past, many of them tinged with the red and black marbling of the Aether's influence, flashed across her mind. An accented voice keeping a sarcastic running commentary Thor's failings. A strong arm around her middle, hauling her away from a sickeningly realistic illusion of Thor's severed hand. The pressure of a long, lean body pressing her into the ash, sheltering her from the concussive force of the exploding Aether. The bruising pressure of unyielding fingers propelling her out of the blast radius of an implosion grenade. A graying form, shivering and clutching a bleeding wound, sprawled on the blackened plains of an alien world.

Yet whenever she remembered Loki, it was her first glimpse of him that sprang to mind first: his eyes bright with cynical amusement in the midst of a dire crisis; his smirk irreverent and so frustratingly self-assured that she instantly wanted to dislike him; introducing himself oh-so-civilly right before her palm connected painfully with his cheek…

"_That was for New York!"_

Jane felt an uneasy pang and looked around herself at the burnt out shells of abandoned storefronts, the boarded-up windows, barricades surrounding dangerous craters in the streets. All the rubble had at last been cleared away, but it only served to show just how much of the city had been eaten up by Loki's selfish ambition. If Jane could truly hate Loki, as she had been all set to do at that first meeting, she should feel it right now. It would be so much simpler if she could. It frustrated her that she couldn't.

The trouble was that he wasn't merely some faceless monster to her now, as the news channels and survivor accounts painted him. There was nothing so straightforward about him. Jane had met him, spoken to him, learned that he was a thoroughly irritating, dangerously intelligent and frighteningly unpredictable individual.

And he'd impressed her beyond her ability to ignore.

Her experiences served to convince her that there had to have been more to him than an egomaniacal alien invader with delusions of grandeur and no regard for human life. She had only a hazy memory of her time as the host of the Aether, but once it had been drawn from her, her mind had cleared; she had been in Loki's protection while Thor took on Malekith and the Kursed. He had kept her constantly out of harm's way, made her safety his first priority, protecting her always before himself. She had depended on him to shield her from danger more times than she could reliably count, and he had not wavered in that duty once. His role as her keeper had culminated in her cowering behind a rock like a frightened child while he took on a fully armed squad of Dark Elves all alone with nothing but a pair of knives. It had been… well, 'awe-inspiring' seemed a bit dramatic, but Jane couldn't think of a better way to describe the feeling it had engendered. She had always assumed Loki's only talent was for using tricks and lies to get others to do his dirty work for him; watching him fight, she'd realized her error. When Thor battled, it was his sheer overwhelming power that astounded; watching Loki, it has been his speed and skill that stole her breath. His movements were so fast, fluid and graceful that it was almost more a deadly dance than a fight to the death, until he fell still, his chest heaving, surrounded on all sides by a ring of pale corpses.

It had occurred to her upon reflection, after watching him analyze, coordinate and execute each motion with dizzying timing and precision that his intellect _was_ his greatest asset, ruthless though it was. He had proved that undeniably with his own death. The horror of watching him be impaled on the blade had barely dimmed her amazement at his presence of mind when she watched him activate the implosion grenade on the creature's belt. The brutally efficient mind of a master strategist, still thinking and executing his plans even as he died; even knowing he had used his intelligence to cause so much pain in the past did not diminish her appreciation of his brilliance – or the fact that he'd used it to save Thor and avenge his mother's death.

No, he wasn't someone she could simply put in her 'bad guy' file and write off as 'better off dead'.

Yet somehow, so far removed by time, distance and circumstance, she had let herself forget the magnitude of his crimes.

Now, standing in the midst of the decimated city that had been his chosen battlefield, she knew she really _should_ despise. Even if she couldn't hate him – and what would be the point of hating a dead man? –there was no way to forgive him either. The sheer scale of gratuitous, wanton devastation was beyond the scope of her ability to excuse.

She thought again of him lying on the ground, of Thor cradling his lifeless body, tears streaming down his face… even as she walked broken streets of Manhattan, she wondered if her inability to forgive him made her heartless.

After all, hadn't Thor confessed to starting a war with the Frost Giants that resulted in untold violence, over a single childish insult? Yet she forgave him for that.

Was it Loki's premeditation that she couldn't forgive? But hadn't she already decided that she admired his intellect?

Was it her bias as a human? Did she blame Loki and not Thor, because it was her planet that Loki had attacked? That really would make her heartless.

Where was the line? Jane knew it existed, but she kept chasing it around in circles, and could make no clear sense of its boundaries. The harder she thought, the more the crisp black and white of conventional morality kept running together into watery shades of gray.

She shivered against the cold of the coming rain, and wished Thor was with her. She didn't like thinking about Loki, and it was completely unavoidable here. Things always seemed simpler when Thor was close by. His strong, decisive presence and hard line, almost obstinate moral compass constantly drove away all doubts about herself and others. It was easier to see the world in black and white, perfect wrong and perfect right; perhaps not always accurate, but so much easier.

Sighing at the morose direction of her own thoughts, Jane stopped impulsively at a street vendor's cart to buy a hot dog, glancing up and down the boulevard. Though the shops on this street were themselves largely empty, there were numerous pavilions, stands, stalls and tarps spread out on the sidewalk in front of the broken storefronts, and commerce continued even in the midst of destruction. Jane contemplated a bit of window shopping. She still needed to find a souvenir for Darcy, and she could stand to burn off a little extra mental energy with a pleasant distraction for once. She should be exhausted after a long day, but she had been sleeping extremely well ever since she arrived in New York, probably courtesy of the high quality mattresses in the high quality hotel that Stark was paying for in exchange for her services. That, and she was finally sleeping alone for the first time since Thor returned from Asgard. She loved falling asleep in Thor's arms, but she wasn't used to sharing a bed with anyone, and Thor took up rather a lot of it.

Another drop of rain splashed against her wrist as she passed her money to the vendor and took her hot dog, and she reluctantly thought better of it. Better to get back and enjoy her last night in her fancy hotel room.

Biting into her junk food, she turned to go, when a hand closed on her wrist.

"A curse!" croaked a heavily accented voice.

Jane jumped and turned, to find a little old lady beside her, her bony hand curled around Jane's wrist like a knobby claw. Her rheumy eyes where enormous behind the thick, wide lenses of her glasses, and her white hair was pulled back in a loose bun. She wore a purple knit shawl around her bony shoulders, covering a floral patterned dress with an old-fashioned cut, and around her neck were hung so many necklaces and pendants that Jane was amazed she could support her own head.

"E-Excuse me?" Jane stammered. She tried to pull out of the old woman's grip, but she was surprisingly strong for someone so small and frail-looking.

"You!" the old woman exclaimed. "The gods, they leave mark here!" She waved her other hand in the general direction of Jane's forehead. "Powerful magic. No good! Very bad! You come, I give charm. For to protect."

She started to pull Jane back the way she'd come, and Jane noticed for the first time the nearby cart. It appeared to be pedaling occult wares, like one of those new age shops, loaded down with tarot cards, crystals, incense and various other obscure objects with obscure uses. Jane felt a surge of irritation, and fought not to role her eyes. She'd actually been worried for a second, but apparently this was just another pushy saleswoman accosting pedestrians out of desperation for business.

"Thanks, but I really need to be going… no, I don't really want… look, let go!" Jane rotated her wrist; the old woman's long fingernails scraped at her skin as she twisted out of her grasp. "Come on! I'm sorry, but I'm not interested in buying anything today!"

"No, no! You! A mark! A curse! Protection for you. Come, I show you. Come!"

"No, really, thanks, but I've got to go…"

"Dangerous!" The old woman peered up into her face, her eyes wide and haunted. Something in her expression made Jane's breath catch in her throat. "He is _dangerous_!"

"Grandmother? What are you doing?"

Jane startled again, and turned to see a younger woman approaching; she was dressed in more modern clothing, but there was an eclectic air about her that matched the cart, and said it belonged to her, or she belonged to it, whichever.

The old crone turned to the woman and started speaking rapidly in a language Jane didn't know. The woman spoke back quietly, the placed a hand on the old woman's shoulder and gently coaxed her in the direction of the bench next to the cart. She turned to Jane with an apologetic smile.

"Forgive her, please," she said; her accent wasn't as thick, but it was there. Jane wished she could place it. "These times have been hard on everyone, and my Grandmother believes it is her duty to help however she can, whether it is wanted or not."

"Um, it's fine," Jane said, shaking her head and smiling reflexively. "No big deal."

She was about to turn to go, when the woman stopped her. Jane noticed her eyes kept drawing up to her forehead, the same area that the old crone had been waving at as she ranted.

"Please, let me…" the woman paused, her eyes flicking again and again up towards Jane's forehead; her kind smile faltered with a worried look. "Let me give you something as compensation for the trouble my Grandmother put you to."

"No, really, that's okay," Jane assured her, wanting now more than ever to get back to her hotel room and shut out the chaos of the city.

"Please, I wouldn't feel right, otherwise." Turning to her cart, she opened up a series of small drawers in the side, sorting through them for something, then turned quickly back and held out her hand. "As a favor to me?"

Jane opened her mouth, closed it, then sighed and tried to smile as she held out her hand to take the offering. Opening her palm, she found it to be a small metal pendant, surprisingly weighty, hung on a black cord. There was a symbol cut into the metal, and otherwise it was bare of embellishment and unremarkable.

"Uh, well, thanks," Jane said, nonplussed, trying to edge away without seeming rude. "I'll, uh… take it…"

"The rune is _hagalaz_," the woman said. "Wear it for protection." She paused, pursing her lips, then looked Jane hard in the eye. "Wear it when you sleep."

Then she smiled kindly again and turned away to tend to her grandmother. Jane was left to blink away her perplexity in the middle of the crowded sidewalk.

"O…kay…" she muttered under her breath. She shook her head, pocketed the pendant and beat a hasty retreat before the disturbing old woman could notice her again. She munched on her hot dog as she walked trying to let her eyes wander over the outdoor stalls rather than the destruction that surrounded them, and made an effort to forget the strange encounter. She couldn't quite put it out of her mind. Something about the way they had looked at her… It didn't sit right with her. The pit of her stomach was tied in knots by the time she made it back to the hotel, and she didn't think it was from the hot dog.

Without quite meaning to, she walked past the elevators and went straight to the hotel's computer center. There were a few business men occupying some of the cubicles, so Jane moved to the computer in the farthest corner of the room; somehow the idea of people who were doing actual work seeing what she was about to look up was embarrassing.

Nevertheless, she brought up the internet browser, opened the search engine and typed in the "hagalaz". Pulling the pendant out of her pocket, she compared it to the image that appeared on the screen. So far so good. Unsure where to start – this was most emphatically _not _her area of expertise – she clicked on the first link she found. Here she discovered that it was one of twenty four runic symbols of the Ancient Norse alphabet. She scrolled down to its entry.

_**Hagalaz**__: Hail. (precipitation); __**Meanings**__: Loss, trials, destruction, change; __**Uses**__: Protection from unwanted influences; breaking destructive patterns;_

_**Analysis**__: Hagalaz represents hail, the ice that falls from the sky. It is often associated with Ragnarok, the end of the world. However, the ending is considered metaphorical rather than literal. In divination, hagalaz represents drastic, sometimes violent change, an ending that brings a new beginning; it drives away safety and complacency, forces us to examine our decisions. It may bring disappointment as well, and realization that our current path is not the one we are meant to follow. Its magical uses include helping one to break negative personal habits, and protection from dangerous external influences. It reveals hidden truths and clears away obscurities to show the real nature of things._

Jane chewed on her lip, unable to put her finger on why this was bothering her so much. It was a weird gift, sure, and she supposed she could see how it could be mean protection, but as she read through the entries, some of the other runes appeared to have qualities more directly related to protection. Yet the woman had searched through her drawers for this rune in particular. Why? It felt… oddly specific.

Her eye caught on a few dark pixels at the bottom of the screen, and she realized there was another line of text under the 'hagalaz' entry. She scrolled down. Her eyebrows shot up as she read:

_**Associated myths and deities**__: Ragnarok. Frost Giants. Loki. _

Jane didn't believe in coincidences. In her experience, the universe wasn't that sloppy. So her first instinct was to let her mind race, wondering how a strange crone and the woman on the street had known to hand her a symbol associated with Loki, when doubts and questions about Loki had been weighing so heavily on her mind.

Rationality quickly reasserted itself. Even though she'd seen what most would term "magic" with her own eyes, she didn't believe in the occult. And she certainly didn't believe Loki was a god, or that wearing a piece of metal around her neck would protect her from anything. It was all superstition; thinking about it logically, this was the city that Loki had leveled with his invasion force. Of course people here would want some kind protection against him, even if it was merely a false sense of metaphysical security. That made sense. That was all there was to it.

Relief swept through her to have an explanation for the unexplained; it was very nearly enough to subsume the lingering sense of unease that plagued her.

Nevertheless, later that evening, after a more substantial meal and a bit of light reading, her mind winding down towards the promise of that comfortable mattress and the eight hours of uncommonly blissful undisturbed sleep, her eyes fell on the rune pendant lying where she had tossed it carelessly on the dresser. As she pulled on her night gown, an irrational urge stole over her. She picked up the pendant, running her thumb over the mark thoughtfully. She rolled her eyes, put it down and walked away. Then she sighed, turned around and picked it up again. Quickly, before she could think too hard about how idiotic she was being, she pulled it over her head and swept her hair out from beneath the cord. It fell just below the hollow of her neck.

"Can't hurt," she muttered, embarrassed in spite of the fact that there was no one there to see her make a fool of herself.

Avoiding the mirror, she switched off the light and climbed into bed. Her skin tingled, prickling with little chills as her muscles relaxed and unwound against the inviting surface; it was both enticing and oddly unnerving, leaving her strangely energized. For a long moment, she considered rising again, though she didn't know what for. The urge was curiously powerful. But the smooth, crisp slide of fresh sheets against her skin was soothing, and she practically melted into the softness of the mattress and pillows. The metal of the pendant was cool, tingling against her collar bone. She drifted swiftly to sleep as the first fat raindrops of the storm spattered against the window.

* * *

A crash of thunder startled Jane awake.

Or something like awake.

Aware would be a better word. Her mind _felt_ wide awake. But her body felt incredibly heavy, and her breathing remained slow and even. In fact… it was so dark in the room, and she was still so muddled from sleep that she couldn't actually tell right away, but… she was pretty sure her eyes were still closed.

Which meant it was extremely strange that she could see the undulating pattern of light on the ceiling, caused by rivulets of water swirling along the window pane in the howling wind, reflecting and refracting the lights of the city far below. She watched it, fascinated, through her closed eyelids.

_ That's not right…_

Maybe she wasn't quite as awake as she first thought.

All she knew for sure was that her heart was pounding. Racing. She felt like there was a weight pressing against her chest. After a moment, she realized that it must be the rune pendant. Had it always been this heavy?

She wanted to look down at it, but she found that she couldn't move. She tried to blink, to lift a hand in front of her face, to turn her head, but her muscles seemed frozen in stone. No matter what she did, her body refused to respond to her commands. A knee-jerk surge of panic jolted through her before she seized hold of it. She was alright, she was breathing, she was fine. _Sleep paralysis,_ her intellect supplied. She had read about it once, years ago; an effect of interrupted REM sleep, causing temporary extreme muscle weakness that mimicked paralysis. The thunder had obviously woken her at an inopportune moment in her sleep cycle. It would pass eventually.

She tried very hard to ignore the fact that that wasn't quite how sleep paralysis worked. Or the fact that it did not even slightly explain how she was _seeing _with her eyes closed…

As she focused more on her surroundings, she became aware of something she had not noticed before. There was a faint greenish glow coming from somewhere just below her chin. From the icy weight of the pendant.

_It's reflecting the lights from the windows… _

Except that neither the metal nor the lights were green.

The light pulsed slightly, and she couldn't help but notice that it seemed to trail, like a ribbon of faint green mist, off to her left into the shadows. She would have swallowed hard, if she could make herself do anything as complex and voluntary as swallowing. Instead, she only managed to make a little humming noise of disquiet and shift in her sleep. Her head turned slightly on her pillow, conveniently following the trail of green light. It was so faint that she wasn't sure it was real.

No, of course it wasn't real. This had to be a dream. Or a product of sleep paralysis. Or some trick of the storm. Her mind worked itself into a frenzy of possibilities designed to bring back that wash of relief she'd felt in the computer room earlier that day. They were all perfectly good, rational explanations.

Even so, she wanted badly to be able to shiver in fear. Because now she could see it.

There was someone standing in the shadows by the window.

Jane's whole body crawled with an electrical surge of terror. Someone was in her room. She wanted to scream, to run, to search for a weapon, to at least be able to squeeze her eyes closed in fear to shut out the sight. All she managed was to sigh again in her sleep and feel her fingers curl loosely against the sheets over her abdomen.

_It's sleep paralysis!_ she shouted at herself, her mental voice sounding a little hysterical._ It's a common symptom of sleep paralysis to have frightening hallucinations. Like an intruder in the room! They used to call it sleep possession. People thought they saw demons! It's characteristic! Textbook! This is all just a kind of dream!_

The trail of greenish non-light ended at the still form, barely more than a silhouette of deeper darkness against the shadows; she thought she could just see the outline of a pair of hands, stretched out in the light from the window, and the green seemed to pool there, pulsing insubstantially.

An eternity seemed to pass, which in reality could have been anything from minutes to hours, but the intruder made no move. After a time, she began to wonder if it was less a case of sleep paralysis, and more a simple case of paranoia letting her imagination carry her away – as though, if she could get up and turn on the light, she would find that what she'd thought was a human figure was in reality just the curtains hanging strangely, or a piece of furniture that caught the light at an angle that made it look alive. But what was that ghostly greenish glow?

_I don't believe in ghosts,_ she reminded herself; but the words sounded small and frightened, seeming to echo inside her head.

A bolt of lightening shattered the night sky.

For barely an instant the room flickered bright as day. Jane's eyes would have widened with disbelief if they weren't still closed. In the flash of light, she had seen the face and form of the man in the shadows.

_It's not real…_

There was no such thing as ghosts.

_It can't be…_

But there was a dead man standing in her room.

…_Loki!_

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**TBC...**

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**AN**: Well now, what do you think? Is Jane seeing ghosts? Is she trapped in a dream? Or could it be the real deal? Let me know in your review! Comments and critique are also highly appreciated, help me become a better writer!

The runes referenced in this story are based on real runic meanings, but some aspects may be embellished or uniquely interpreted for the purposes of this story.

Once again, this story was inspired by an awesome fan art by Selene on Tumblr, please go take a look, you will be sorry if you miss it!

The title of the story, and the quote at the beginning, are from the hauntingly beautiful and melancholy song, _Carnival of Rust, _by Poets of the Fall; your homework is to listen to it; it is near the top of my Lokane playlist, the lyrics are perfect, and its kind of like my theme song for this story/soon-to-be-series. Go listen!

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts! Remember, reviews motivate the muse!


	2. Chapter 2

**AN**: Thank you so, so much to everyone who has reviewed! My muse is one happy little inebriated primate! Vodka for everyone!

This chapter is basically an exposition of my Lokane head canon, and the body of what the originally-planned one-shot would have been, if the little drunken monkey that controls the levers in my brain had not gone off on a bender and constructed a whole other complex of subplots around it. Sorry for the tardy update, but I have been picking at this for over two weeks now, disassembling and reassembling it again and again, and I'm still not entirely satisfied. But I'm not quite sure what exactly I would do differently, so I will let you be the judge. Please enjoy, and let me know what you think in your review!

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_It's a dream! _Jane thought desperately. _I can see the room even though my eyes are still closed. That isn't physically possible. I'm dreaming. _The heavy, icy presence of the pendant seemed to sing against her skin. _I _have _to be dreaming…_

Loki stepped silently into the comparative brightness of city lights glittering through the glass. The rain slammed against the window, uproariously loud beside the thick silence within the room. Slow, fluid movements made his steps completely quiet against the carpet as his shadow fell across her sleeping form. In spite of the darkness he cast across her, the closer he got, the more sharply she could see him, as though proximity made him more real. She wanted to squirm out of her skin and run away.

_Calm down! _she ordered herself harshly, fighting terror. _It's just my imagination! Just a nightmare! My mind working through my doubts from earlier! Maybe if I just let it play out, I will wake up… _

Maybe if she kept repeating it, she would start to believe it. Logic told her that she must be correct, but logic wasn't watching a dead alien prince pacing ever closer through the shadows, and her fear did not respond well to it. The sight of him bleeding into the ashes of the Dark World kept flashing through her memory as he drew nearer and nearer. _I don't believe in ghosts!_

Whatever he was, Jane could not take her eyes off of him. Literally, she had no choice but to watch, helpless, defenseless, as he closed in on her.

He seemed to be having the same problem with her, his eyes locked on her with magnetic focus. He stopped directly beside her, so close enough to touch, and stared down at her, his face wary and unreadable. When he didn't immediately do anything further, began to wonder through the tempest of her shock and confusion what he could possibly be doing here. Even in her dreams, he could not be up to any good.

His eyes traced over her face and down to rest on her chest… no, on the hollow of her neck. Where the pendant lay.

His expression didn't change, exactly, but something in his eyes seemed to quietly break as he examined it, then to harden. She tried to hold her breath as he slowly lowered himself to crouch down beside the bed, but it sighed in and out as deeply and evenly as ever. But her heart lurched painfully in her chest, galloping as though it could carry her away from danger if it could beat fast enough. She didn't understand how she could be panicking this badly and still be so deeply asleep.

Especially when she saw his hand reaching for her.

_It's a dream! It's not real! Loki is dead! I don't believe in ghosts! I don't believe in ghosts! I don't… I… don't… Don't touch me! _

He stopped. His hand was an inch from her skin, his fingers hovering over her throat. He slowly drew in a deep breath, his eyes narrowing defiantly. Then she felt his fingers brush along her collar bone. Charged with adrenaline as she was, she felt that delicate caress throughout her entire body, like she was water, and the tentative glide of his fingers had created ripples that spread out over every part of her.

Lightening split the night again. But this time, it was inside. There was a crackling, snapping noise, and a flash of green lit the room. Loki drew his hand back with a hiss, curling his fingers reflexively into a fist. His eyes narrowed dangerously, a look of frustration so potent that it bordered on outrage darkening his pale features, and she heard him huff out an angry breath. Slowly, he lowered his hand to rest on the bed at her side, carefully not touching her.

"Oh, Jane…" The sound of his voice, so close and real in the quiet, caused a visceral reaction, twisting her stomach in knots and sending little thrills of fear along her spine to skip between the beats of her heart. "What have you done?"

What the _hell _did that mean? She was wondering what kind of answer she would give, if only she could wake up, when she realized, with the weight and relief of an epiphany, that he didn't expect one. His voice held an introspective quality; his tone was thoughtful. He was talking to her, but in a way that one might speak to a person in a coma – or in a grave – you weren't really talking to them, you were talking to yourself.

_He doesn't know I'm awake… _she realized.

_I'm _not_ awake,_ she insisted to herself on the heels of that thought. _Loki is dead, and this can _only _be a dream…_

His brow troubled and furrowed with frustration.

"Always _so_ unpredictable, always changing the rules, always causing me trouble…" he sighed and a sad, reluctant smile curled one corner of his mouth. "Wonderful, Jane. Perfect. I wouldn't have you any other way." Slowly, the smile faded. "But now what will I do?" he murmured, shaking his head, a dark, haunted, almost frightened light flickering in his eyes for an instant. "What will you make me do next?"

He fell quiet, and there he remained, his eyes fastened unwaveringly on her sleeping face, though they occasionally darted back and forth, as though he were thinking hard and only half seeing her. His jaw clenched intermittently, as though he were swinging between seething rage and quiet desperation. He did not try to touch her again. Jane began losing all sense of time, wishing her head had turned far enough to put her in view of the clock on the nightstand, but this interval of stillness was comparatively short. Loki seemed to reach some kind of decision, because his eyes slid closed and Jane read something like bitter resignation in his features as his head bowed slightly as though under a great weight.

"There's so much I need to say to you… so much that has to remain unsaid… and so little chance you could ever understand. But since this is the last time I can visit you like this..." His eyes snapped open again, and practically danced with a kind of dark amusement that made Jane want to curl into a ball and hide under her covers. "Where should I begin?"

He reached for her again, this time to stroke a few strands of hair back from her face. Her skin tingled as more arcs of green lightening lanced through her field of vision. Up from her body, she realized with a start, to strike at the oncoming digits. She watched him wince in pain as he jerked his hand back once more.

Something was keeping him from touching her.

"_Wear it for protection. Wear it when you sleep."_

The pendant.

_That's insane… _even inside her head, it sounded like denial. _I don't believe in magic any more than I believe in ghosts…_

"The first time I saw you," Loki said quietly, interrupting her rationalization, "was the day I was made king of Asgard. You wouldn't know it to hear my _dear brother's_ traitorous friends tell the tale, but I truly was the rightful ruler in Odin's stead. Otherwise I could never have been granted use of the all-seeing eyes endowed upon the king when he sits upon the throne." He sighed with an air of martyred disgust, shaking his head. "All the Nine Realms to ponder from the seat of supreme power, and pathetic as it is, do you know where I turned my gaze first? Down to Midgard, of course, to see what manner of trouble my fool of a brother was finding for himself. And what should I discover, Jane, but that he had found you?"

The small smile that touched his lips was some how both wistful and vicious.

"I saw you ram him with your vehicle," he said with a small chuckle, mirth making his voice deceptively light. "And I watched you scold him for his rudeness, and draw an oath from him to act like a civilized being. I wonder if you can imagine how unheard of that is. My brother is such a brute it sometimes amazes me that he can even stand upright. He was more beast than man for over a thousand years, stomping about the Realms like a barbarian, taking whatever he desired, and taking his hammer to anyone who didn't like it. No one could command him, shame him or bring him to heel. And yet in the course of three days, I watched you tame him."

He cocked his head, his eyes softening.

"Have you any idea how fascinating you are to watch, Jane?" He hummed thoughtfully to himself, as though contemplating his own words. "Perhaps it is because we are so long-lived, but Asgardians are not particularly curious by nature; nor elves, nor giants. And mortals are not clever in the slightest," he snorted lightly. "Nor elves, nor giants. Yet _you… _you are both. You are the only mortal in Midgard… no, the only being I have ever met _anywhere_, if I am honest… with the curiosity and cleverness to rival my own. You captivated me. Even more rapidly than you ensnared Thor."

What in the world was he talking about? Jane's mind reeled. She didn't know quite what she'd been expecting, but this definitely wasn't it. He couldn't possibly be saying what she thought he was saying.

"It was almost insurmountably difficult for me," he went on conversationally, "to reconcile my growing regard for you with your inferiority as a Midgardian mortal. But the more I watched you, the more I grew to respect you. Such passion and courage, so fierce and ambitious, so unpredictable, yet so loyal. So driven, so determined to prove yourself, yet at the same time soft, sweet, vulnerable… the force of your will matched only by the scope of your imagination and the sweet spice of your nature, all hidden away in such a fragile, ephemeral form… I… I couldn't admit it then, could barely even understand or recognize it with so many other worries and sorrows clouding my mind. Perhaps if I had been less heartsick, less vulnerable, perhaps… but such a woman as you…" He shook his head again, casting his eyes down. "No, there was no escaping your pull. To lay eyes on you was to be lost."

_Okay… maybe he _is_ saying what I think he's saying…_ Despite her continued fear and unease, Jane wanted to blush and fidget. Fortunately or unfortunately, she was still asleep and watching him through her eyelids, so she couldn't. Never in her wildest dreams… _No, _only_ in my wildest dreams; this is just further proof that his is all happening in my head_, she insisted to herself. _If the alien ghost and the magic necklace didn't convince me, Loki confessing his love has to be the final straw. None of this can possibly have any basis in reality._

The trouble was, it all felt very, very real.

His eyes flicked back up at her face, intent.

"I didn't truly realize it until I was fighting Thor before the Bifrost. It struck me, hard as Mjolnir struck the bridge, breaking it into pieces… breaking _me _into pieces. I called out to Thor that if he destroyed the bridge, he would never see you again. I truly believed that _that_, if nothing else, would give him pause, give me… I don't know, a moment, time enough to do something, to stop him from destroying all of my carefully laid plans..." he shook his head, his face and voice expressive and his eyes distant as he lost himself in his tale. "But he ignored my words. I was astonished. And _disgusted_. He was willingly sacrificing you to save a race of ice-bound savages. _You_, Jane… a creature such as _you _would grant him your favor, and he traded it away for a world full of monsters."

His lip curled as he spat the words, as though they offended him. Jane felt a little twist of… something… behind her breast bone. Something like… vindication? She winced internally. She would never have wanted Thor to trade innocent lives just to keep a promise to her. But it didn't change the fact that a small, selfish part of her resented those two years of uncertainty, loneliness and hurt, justified as they had been. To have those feelings defended, twisted and unacceptable as they were… _Am I really that pathetic? _She wondered again if she really was heartless.

"He always was a fool, always acting without thinking," Loki went on, cutting short her self-recrimination, "But that day his rashness educated me. For in that moment, watching him cast you aside without a moment's hesitation, I thought to myself…" he leaned closer, his voice dropping to a low pitched whisper that seemed to slither along every nerve in her body, "…if she were mine, there is nothing I would not sacrifice for her. Nothing I would not endure. Nothing I would not destroy. For her, I would watch worlds _burn_."

Jane's stomach twisted with foreboding. A peal of thunder rattled the windows.

Loki leaned back, his eyes seeming to smolder in the darkness, before he blinked and appeared to mentally shake himself, the intensity of a moment before falling jarringly aside as he glanced away from her to examine the landscape painting that hung on the wall across the bed.

"Mere moments later, I fell," he continued, his tone so matter-of-fact and casually bored that he might have been commenting on the weather rather than airing all of the deepest secrets of his soul. "The men I had always known as my brother and my father watched from the broken end of the bridge, doing nothing, as I was swallowed up into the void."

He paused, and his eyes drifted back down to hers, tracing her features intently, familiarly, as though he'd done so countless times before. Had he? Jane's foreboding deepened. _He said this was the last time he would visit me… _How many times before had he stood over her like this, while she was unaware of it?

_But it's just a dream… _she comforted herself unconvincingly _…isn't it?_

"When I dropped into that abyss, I did not care if I lived or died. But when I landed in an unfamiliar place, on an unfamiliar world, far outside the Realms of the World Tree, populated with all sorts of unfamiliar beings, I found myself deeply grateful that the vortex had not claimed me. Eager as I had been to throw my life away, something in me refused to die. And yet," an edge of bitterness crept into his words, "I had nothing left. No home, no name. I was utterly alone in ways I had never prepared myself to face. I wandered the dark places between the stars, bereft of all hope." He shivered in a way Jane envied. "The universe is… unkind, Jane. It finds _creative_ ways to make you suffer. The lower you sink, the uglier and more brutal it becomes. I never want you to learn that for yourself, so trust me when I tell you: even when you believe you have experienced the deepest depravities imaginable, you can still discover new ways to feel _pain_."

He swallowed hard and looked away again, as though suddenly unable to meet her non-gaze, his eyes wide and fixed, full of some horrific memory. He was quiet for what felt like a very long time before they refocused on her with a haunted look still clouding them. But they grew less glassy and frightened the longer he looked down at her.

"In my darkest hours…" he said, his voice slightly hoarse, "I… thought of you." The beginnings of a smile that Jane might almost call gentle softened his features. "I recalled your sharp eyes and your shining spirit, the sassy snap of your voice, the bright song of your laughter... You were my last memory of light and goodness in a world made of shadows and agony." He closed his eyes, momentarily overcome by some bittersweet emotion. "It was you, Jane. I _need_ you to know that."

His eyes fluttered open again, and though hers were still closed, he was looking right at her, as though he could see through her eyelids to stare into her eyes, and from there, right down into her soul. Even if she had command of her body, the raw intensity of his gaze would have pinned her inescapably in place.

"While all else in the universe conspired to nurture my wrath and secure my vengeance," he pressed on, his voice dropping to an impassioned murmur, "you became the shape and figure of all my hope. You were the lamp that led me safe and straight across the treacherous darkness to my destiny. And the rain… you were the rain that washed me clean each time I dirtied my hands in order to survive." He shook his head and glanced away. "I didn't mean to love you. But how could I not?"

Jane's world spun with the sheer ardor in his voice, and the magnitude of what he was expressing. She didn't know what to think – this was so surreal it bordered on absurd – so she tried very hard not to think anything at all. _Let it play out… I'll wake up. God, I hope I'll wake up…_

"Even so, it wasn't until I was trapped in the blackest pits of desolation, broken, defeated, stripped bare of everything I had always known or been, robbed of any fleeting hope of going back..." He forced out a breath between clenched teeth as his fingers fisted in the sheets beside her, as though caught in some memory so terrible that it undid his control of his own limbs. He made a visible effort to relax his bunched muscles before turning his eyes back towards her, as though he didn't want to associate those dark emotions with the sight of her. "Only then did I realize what I should do. What I _needed _to do in order to be whole again. And after all, I had promised my brother that I would pay you a visit…"

He reached for her again, and Jane tried ineffectually to recoil. He paused before he could touch her skin, his hand drawing back at the last instant as though he had forgotten himself, and the pendant's bite. He wavered there for an instant, indecisive, before his fingers tightened into a fist again, this time from frustration. His voice gained a hard, angry edge.

"Thor had given you up," he growled through clenched teeth. "And he gave me up as well, even before he learned that I was…" Loki cut that thought off with a decisive shake of his head. "He had turned his back on both of us, Jane. He had given up every right to expect loyalty."

He reached out for her again, then recoiled again. With a low, angry noise from the back of his throat, he sprang to his feet and paced away from her, his frame wound tight with aggravated energy, as though he could not bear to be so near her with out touching her any longer. He stepped towards the window, and Jane could just barely see his reflection in the glass as he stared out at the rain.

"I knew you were on Midgard, as abandoned as I by Thor's foolish choices. And I knew that if only I could find a way to reach you, that I could…" the words seemed to stick in his throat and he had to try again to get them out. When they finally came, they were almost sheepish and self-deprecating, tinged with a kind of raw, hopeless longing. "I was certain… that I could find a way to make you love me."

Jane didn't know if she wanted to laugh or cry. His expression in the reflection of the window was so raggedly vulnerable that she was suddenly intensely grateful that she was unable to react. She had absolutely no idea what she would have done in the face of this kind of confession. She could still barely believe what she was listening to. And the sense of foreboding that lingered in her gut, coupled with the way his broken expression began to darken and harden, warned her that there was worse to come.

"So…" he sighed, nodding his head slowly as though he were reliving and reaffirming a past decision that he regretted but could not have avoided, "…to reach Earth… to reach you…" silence hung in the air between them like the Sword of Damocles, before he severed its thread with a note of finality, "…I sold myself. Body, mind and soul. To a creature that wanted to reach Earth almost as badly as I." He smirked out at the stormy night. "He too desired to woo a lady. A lady named Death. And the Tesseract was the jewel he had chosen to present her."

His expression turned bitterly mocking.

"To this day, your Avengers believe I came to conquer Midgard, in order to impress Odin, or to irritate Thor, or even to make myself king of the _ants_. And oh, I admit I _did _enjoy the show." He huffed out a derisive little laugh, his voice dripping with disdain. "It was almost too easy, watching them dance on my strings; I barely even needed the scepter. But all of that was mere means to an end, Jane. This night, you and I alone will know the truth."

Jane didn't want to hear his truth.

"All of it…

_No…_

"… _all _of it, Jane…"

_Please…_

"…all the suffering and destruction, all the fire and screaming and the blood… all of the killing… "

_Don't say it…_

"…all of it was for you."

In her mind's eye, Jane saw the burnt out shells of the buildings, the jagged skyline, the craters in the streets – the little make-shift memorials of pictures and flowers that littered the streets, marking the spots where loved ones had died…

_No! _ The fear soaking her body ignited into a sudden updraft of fiery anger, and in an instant she wanted to leap up out of the bed, rage at him, to claw at him, to kick and scream, to make him bleed if she could. _ To hell with that! You made your own goddamn choices! It had nothing to do with me! Nothing! I won't share your guilt! I won't…_

She heard him draw in a slow breath, watched the set of his shoulders and the bend of his neck relax, as though speaking the words had dropped a weight from his shoulders. Her heart leapt as he spun around and descended to kneel beside her again. This time, though, he moved even closer, and the mattress shifted as he rested his arms beside her and brought his chin down to rest on the backs of his hand. She couldn't see his face anymore, just the outline of his dark hair in her periphery, but she could _feel _him beside her, his nearness, his face was right next to hers, the slow warm fan of his breath on her cheek, stirring her hair. She longed for a moment of control, to at least be able to track him with her eyes, to watch the change in his expressions, to do anything but be completely at his capricious mercy. He never touched her, but she could feel his heat and nearness, and the sweep of his eyes raked her more penetratingly than any physical touch. She wondered if he could hear the blood thundering through her veins in mimic of the storm outside.

"I wonder," Loki said thoughtfully, "if Eric Selvig ever told you what the Tesseract does to those it touches." He spoke softly, gently, barely above a whisper, but his lips were right next to her ear, and she could feel the vibration of his voice dancing along the fine hairs on her skin and invading her mind. "It doesn't change you, you know. The Tesseract _reveals_ you. It tears down _every _wall, _every _inhibition, _every _doubt, until the ugly, unbalanced core of you stands naked at the mercy of whoever has the knowledge to lay hands on it."

His voice grew harsher by the moment as he spoke of it, the crest of his emotions beginning to build as he cast demons from his memory into her imagination. Maybe if she could have trembled or recoiled, done something, _anythin__g_, in response to the sensation his words and proximity elicited, she could have dispelled the terrible energy coursing through her body, searing her emotions and scattering her thoughts. But she remained helpless, a captive audience in every sense.

"Once I had surrendered myself, it seeped into the very fabric of my being," he murmured; it sounded to Jane like his teeth were clenched behind his lips. "Rotting away every lie I had built to shield myself from my true nature. No one should ever have to face themselves the way the Tesseract forced me to do. I didn't understand that until it was far too late. I had already let that creature pry open my mind and rip away every wall, every shelter, every pretty lie I had ever built to deny my deepest, most primal desires. He found me, deep inside myself, and he showed me what I _really _am."

Jane felt sick. _Don't tell me, _she begged silently. _I don't want to hear this._

_ I don't want to be the cause of this._

"Do you know what I am, Jane?" His voice was a ragged, begging, angry now, and hurt in ways she couldn't comprehend. "I am _chaos_. I am _destruction. _I am _fear_. I am killing frost and all-consuming fire. That is _me, _and that is the weapon that I placed in the hands of the Chitauri general, as payment for passage across the universe to Earth. That is what I unleashed on your little world, what I breathed into your finest minds, what I sowed amongst your greatest heroes." At last, perhaps because he was close enough that she could feel his breath wash over her skin, she was able to tremble slightly at the terrible truths he unfolded. "Nothing more or less than the sum of all that I am, gilt in tongues of blue flame and offered up as a _gift_ to consecrate my devotion. To _you._"

Once again he sounded bitter, but this time towards her. Almost… betrayed. _That's not fair, _Jane thought furiously. _How was I supposed to know? What was I supposed to do about it even if I did? _She mentally shook herself, trying to pull away from the hypnotic undertow of his voice. _I will not submit to these mind games! I am _not_ the cause of this! I refuse to be your scapegoat!_

What was he really saying though? That he had let the Tesseract make him some kind of mentally unstable marionette for this unnamed alien monster? Even if it was true, it didn't absolve him. She tried to hold on to that – what he'd done was cruel, selfish, callous, murderous, and unequivocally wrong! But her complicated, gray-blurred musings on morality from earlier were still fresh in her mind and their insidious whisper mixed with his, the water colors of right and wrong running together in a confused wash of hues.

_If even half of what he's saying is true, was it really a choice? _that swirling sliver of her brain wondered rebelliously._ To continue to suffer through what sounds like a living hell, or sell your soul for a chance to escape and achieve all your hearts desires? _Could she honestly say she'd choose differently? Jane didn't know. But he couldn't lay the blame for it at her feet! _He let himself be controlled, and that's all there is to it. _If only that were all there was to it… _Maybe he wants to vent his feelings and feel like he's been absolved. That's what confessions like this are for. But does he regret what he did? Would he change it if he could? Would he do it again if he thought he could get what he wanted? _

How much did any of that matter?

_It matters to me… _She didn't understand why, but she realized it was true.

Loki rambled on, ignorant of her internal struggle. The anger in his voice had cooled again. Jane realized that his moods seemed to come in waves, building, cresting and spilling over onto her, and that they were growing ever more volatile with each surge. Her throat wanted to close with fear as she wondered if she would survive the deluge unscathed, or drown in it.

"Once inside, my master owned me almost completely. All but my knowledge of you. That alone I was able to keep from him." She thought she could hear a small smile in his voice. "Of that, at least, I can be truly proud. I buried you deep as I could behind the layers of my rage and revenge. And he _never_ found you inside me."

He sighed gustily, rubbing a hand over his forehead as though suddenly weary; Jane hummed involuntarily in her sleep, and her face turned towards his, nuzzling into the pillow to banish the tickle of his breath against her skin. His face came into view again as he cocked his head, seemingly fascinated by her unconscious movements. He swallowed hard, and Jane thought he might try to touch her again. Instead, he spun around and lowered himself to sit on the floor beside the bed, so that all that was visible was the dark fall of his hair and the wide frame of his shoulders.

"Much as it shames me, however, I must confess, my want of you was touched by the whispers of the Tesseract itself. I didn't want what I felt for you to be corrupted by the ugliness of what I had to do to reach you, but there was no part of me that hideous blue fire did not singe. It… lured my love for you into my other ambitions. Of all I did, my greatest disgrace is that I allowed it to use you against me, to make you the prize for every villainy, and the balm for every injury. Even in the shadow of the horrors I committed, the Tesseract made it all seem perfectly clear: I could become as blood soaked and monstrous as need be, because when I at last held you in my arms, it would balance every sacrifice. Every evil." He shook his head, cringing slightly, as though embarrassed. "Can you imagine my secret heart, Jane? That dreamed of you even as I lay waste to your land? In the grip of the Cube, I made such audacious plans…" His shoulders sagged slightly, and his head bowed.

Outside, the rain battered the window with such ferocity, Jane wondered distantly if it had turned to hail. _Hagalaz, _she thought, _how appropriate. _She had an irrational urge to laugh, mostly because it was better than the urge to cry when there was nothing she could do to satisfy it.

"My dreams grew darker as the stain of blood on my hands deepened. While I paced that glass cage your Avengers had fashioned for their pet monster, waiting impatiently for my traps to spring, all I thought of was you. Of the day I would be enthroned as the god of Midgard, and have you brought before me; of gazing down into your wide, frightened, fascinated eyes and knowing that you saw me as I truly was; of displaying my trophies to you – the shield, the iron man, the bow… the hammer. I dreamed of raising you up by my side, of laying your entire world at your feet, of giving you everything you could ever have wanted, and everything you never knew you wanted."

His tone changed, and she could practically feel the wicked smile that curved his mouth.

"And I dreamed about the endless, arduous challenge of winning your favor and adoration… about watching you struggle wildly against me, in mind and in body, and against own desires… about making you beg, making you cry, making you scream for me… about making you smile and laugh, only for me… about your bright nature slowly succumbing to my darker one, subsumed in it as I tempted you ever further into my web, until your lost, entangled light shone only for me… until your magnificent mind aligned with mine, and your heart opened up to absolve me of all my ugliness… until your body opened willingly to embrace me… Oh, Jane, I could blush to describe what I wanted to do to you to addict you to my touch… what I still would do to you, if only…"

He was breathing too fast, as though his heart raced to describe his fantasies out loud. His shoulders flexed, and he leaned his head back carelessly. A few strands of hair brushed her elbow and little green sparks skittered along them like static electricity. His frame stiffened, and his breathing hitched, then slowed. The pain seemed to remind him that all these grand plans of his had been in vain. His head dipped again, pulling away.

"I vowed to burn worlds for you Jane." Jane felt twin tears leak from the corners of her sleeping eyes. "And in the Tesseract's insidious grip, that is _exactly _what I did."

The wind howled outside. Thunder crashed and the windows rattled with the force of it. Jane had a wild, desperate thought that if that thunder could reach her, Thor would know she needed him, and rescue her from these unwanted revelations, hold her close, quiet her mind, make her stop thinking, make everything simple again… but neither the wind nor the rain penetrated the seals of glass and concrete. And in spite of everything – or maybe because of it – she had long since given up counting on Thor to come for her. There was nothing to stand between Jane and Loki but the pendant lying on her chest.

Suddenly – so suddenly that it made her wish she could scream - he moved to turn, to look at her again, darting around like a striking snake to face her… _No! I can't look at his face! I don't want to see what he's feeling! Please -! _

There was a thunderous crash, directly over the building. Lightening screamed down from the clouds. An instant before she could glimpse the expression he wore, the lights outside the window went dark. The shadows of the hotel room rose over her sight like a flood of black ink, swallowing everything into the shade of night.

_A power outage_, her higher thoughts supplied after a moment, swimming up through the fog of panic and sorrow he'd stirred inside her head.

The darkness was absolute. So was the silence.

For a long time, everything was still. Beyond the beat of the storm, silence reigned, and all she could hear was the pounding in her ears.

Maybe he was gone.

_Please let it be over…. _

Maybe he had never really been there.

_If it's a nightmare, just let me wake up. _

Maybe she was finally awake. She didn't dare test it by trying to move. To try risked the possibility of failure.

She had a wild thought of Ebenezer Scrooge begging the Ghost of Christmas-Yet-to-Come for a second chance. Not caring how ridiculous it was, she bargained silently with the universe that she would do her best to believe in ghosts from now on, no matter how asinine the idea was, if this one would just leave her alone...

_Let him go rest in peace now, or whatever… let _me_ rest in peace…_

Her whole body buzzed with terror of the unknown.

The room was cold and quiet. Her heart began to calm.

Yes, of course. Whatever it had been, surely it was over, she told herself…

Lightening had hit the generators, causing the crash that had wakened her, she reasoned… it had just been an incredibly vivid dream.

Silly to lie here in the dark when she was so keyed up. She should get up and go dig her pen light out of her bag. Maybe get dressed, go downstairs, make sure everything was alright.

It was over now… of course it was over now… it had to be over now...

More tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. It didn't matter how hard she wished or rationalized. She could feel it.

He was still there, beside her.

"Now look at me…"

Jane wanted to sob at the sound of his deadpan, hopeless voice blooming out of the blackness.

"…I, who should have been your king and your god, reduced to stealing into your bedchamber in the night like some sneak thief…"

_It can't be real, it just can't…_

"…unable to look into your eyes, or hear you voice, never to talk with you, laugh with you, hold you… never to share in anything you give _him _so undeservedly…"

_The real Loki would never…_

"… casting sleeping spells on you so that I can kneel before you like a slave on this field of my defeat and count your precious, numbered breaths like the pathetic, lovesick _fool _I've become…"

_Sleeping spells. No wonder I've been sleeping so soundly. Please don't be real…._

"…and like a fool, I thought it would be enough. At least until I could… but no, I have been truly blind. This little act of defiance, this Midgardian magic you have procured, has changed everything. It isn't often I am bested at my own game. But you have changed all the rules, Jane. Enough is not the same it was before. For good or ill, you've made me see what should have been obvious by now: with you, enough could _never_ be enough."

_Please be a dream… I don't know what I'm going to do if this is…_

"And yet now I am denied even the ability to _touch _you without…"

Suddenly green light flashed through the black abyss of the night as she felt his fingers side into her hair, cradling her face. Emerald lightning arced through the inky darkness, and in the acid green haze of the magic, she could see the outline of his face, wild with anger and contorted with pain. His fingers spasmed, and there was a low noise in the back of his throat, but he held on.

He held on… with a real touch. A real hand, cradling her face, tightening with pain…

_Not a dream! Real! _

"I can't help it," he gasped. "I can't help what I have to do now, Jane. I believed I had lost _everything_ for a second time when Thor took me from Midgard in chains. And cloistered in Odin's dungeon, as the Tesseract's grip on me abated I was forced to relive every ugly, demeaning, blood-soaked act I had committed through unclouded eyes, believing it had all been for nothing. But now… now that I am free, in every sense… now that I have a second chance… I have to at least try, Jane. I have to believe there's a chance, because we both know there's no going back…"

He shook his head, closing his eyes as though mired in humiliation and frustration.

Then he smirked dangerously and opened them, leaning close over her, the arcing currents of magic striking out at him like writhing serpents.

"Just as we both know that my sleeping spell failed long ago, and you can hear _every word I've said_..."

Panic spiked through her so fiercely that it caused something clear and fragile that Jane hadn't previously realized was there to shatter inside her mind.

With a shuddering gasp, at long last, her eyes flew open. She was wide awake, blinking frantically.

And face to face with Loki in the green glow of the rune's protective magic.

"Loki…" she breathed, both relieved and terrified. She shivered as she had been waiting so long to do, frightened, confused and strangely, intensely aware of him. Her skin felt alive with electricity. Yet somehow her overriding emotion was still surprise. "You're here… you're alive… how…" She trailed off as his expression shifted.

In spite of the pain that was obviously coursing through him, she watched his eyes drop closed and his lips part in a jagged sigh, as though the sound of his name on her tongue brought him physical pleasure. His fingers suddenly tightened her hair, and she whimpered, afraid, as it wrenched her head back at a sharp angle, holding her immobile. He lowered his face against the exposed arch of her throat. Her mouth flew open in a gasp of shock as he ran his lips along the line of her neck, nipping at her pulse.

"Do you realize you've never spoken my name before?" he breathed against her skin, his voice tight with a mix of emotion and the intensity of the pain the pendant was pouring into him. Even so, he refused release her. "You're playing with fire, temptress. Of all the nights I have come to visit you… of all the lies I dared to dream… all the madness of my vivid imagination… there was one desire above all that I never gave in to. Because there is no point in taking what you aren't aware I have stolen." He raised his head to face her, and his hand unclenched from her hair and slid down to replace his lips, wrapping loosely around her throat, holding her head gently but inescapably in place as he stared down into her wide, frightened eyes with a look of agonized adoration that she did not know how to answer. "But you can see me now. You can feel me. I won't be sorry. Your lips have betrayed your virtue. And so must I."

He kissed her.

Her eyes widened as his slid closed. His mouth was surprisingly warm, his lips soft and firm_._ He smelled like spice and leather and a man, and as he tilted his head to deepen the kiss, his hair fell across her cheek, and she thought she caught a hint of apples… Her body sparked, and her blood, seeded with adrenaline and anxious energy, caught tingled and blazed in reaction to his ardor. It was a purely physical response, a product of tightly wound tension, merely a chemical reaction to a stimulus… but it was powerful. Powerful enough to drive a small, wanting noise from the back of her throat. The sound of it seemed to drive the breath out of him in a pained sigh and he pressed closer, his lips claiming hers with a kind of determined and fatalistic desperation – a first kiss that was also the last. Magic leapt between them, sizzling, burning, coiling around them like green serpents, like thorny vines, like squeezing tentacles, dazzling her while it burned and stung him, and still his lips moved over hers, firm and defiant, teasing and insistent, refusing with a will of iron to give ground until he had taken what he would have, and had told her without words all he could about the yearning that burned in him more unbearably than any magic ever could…

With a groan of pain, he pulled away, releasing her, and the world plunged into blackness again as the green firestorm abated. For a long moment the only sound was the thunder of the rain on the window and his tortured, ragged breaths as he recovered from the agony-inducing magic that stood sentinel between them. Jane discovered that she was both breathless and boneless, and this time it wasn't any kind of magic or trick of the nervous system holding her down. She should be scrambling out of the bed, covering herself with a robe, trying to run for the door, maybe searching for a blunt object for good measure… something, anything. Instead, overwhelmed, she lay there, breathing nearly as hard as he, trying to process what was happening and failing utterly.

_I'm missing something. _That thought was clear amidst the confusion. After… after _that… _she was admittedly having an extremely difficult time doubting his sincerity. But something… something in all this didn't add up. If only she could think between the threads of electricity that kept zinging relentlessly along her nerves, scattering little supernovas under her skin and detonating them behind her eyes. It was incredibly distracting. She turned her eyes in his general direction, and despite the lightlessness, she was sure she could feel him looking back. His breath hitched softly, the sound amplified by the deprivation of sight.

"You destroy me, Jane," he breathed, his voice breaking almost imperceptibly. It occurred to her to wonder if there were tears in his eyes. She felt him shift beside her, and imagined he was looking out the window at the black winds of the rainstorm beyond. "When I freeze inside, you melt me. When I burn, you wash over me and quench the flames. You bring peace to my chaos, and when I would seek peace, you make me restless… You are the rain to my rage. Do you understand yet? Have I explained myself plainly enough? You are my rain… and I can't…"

"Loki I…" This had to stop. Whatever it was that was bugging her, her first priority had to be to put a stop to these declarations, so that she could reassemble the scattered fragments of her whirling mind and piece this puzzle together. "I don't… I can't… you must know I can't…"

"No!"

Suddenly, his hand was at her throat again, but this time it wasn't gentle. The green lightning erupted and she managed to suck in a panicked breath before the strength of his hand forced her airway closed. Unbidden, the old woman's wide, haunted eyes flashed through her mind, and her words echoed in her ears: "_He is dangerous!"_

"Do _not _say it! You _don't_ understand!" In the crackling green light of the magic, he looked almost as desperate as she suddenly felt as she reached up to scrabble ineffectually at his iron grip. The wave of his volatile emotions had crested again… and this time, she was going to drown in it. "You don't understand," he repeated. "But you have to try! And so do I." He stared down at her, his expression stricken as he watched her face begin to turn purple. "Gods, Jane, you make me want… impossible things. You make me hope for things I shouldn't even dare to dream. You make me want to _rip reality apart_ to make them real." His eyes narrowed, and his tone lowered warningly. "And you should not doubt that I will. If I have to."

More tears leaked from the corners of her eyes as she dug her fingernails into his skin to absolutely no effect. Her lungs felt like they were on fire.

"It truly is a kind of madness," Loki snarled, somehow managing to accuse her with his tone, even as he choked the life out of her. Her fingers, useless as fronds of kelp waving listlessly against his rock hard grip under an ocean of pain and panic, were beginning to go numb. "Thor divides his devotion and throws you scraps, and he would have all of you; while I have given all of myself, for nothing but a stolen kiss, and a fool's hope that you could be the one to…." He shook his head, biting off the end of the sentence; his expression was something wild and alien with a poisonous brew of desire and shame. "No… no, not yet. Some few secrets I will keep for myself, despite all you have driven me to reveal tonight… just in case you really are _naïve_ enough to surrender your whole heart to him." He leaned in closer. "But no, not your whole heart either. Never that… He might have every other part of you…" the twist of his lips became mocking and conspiratory, "but for a short while, Jane, you and I burned this world together. We two alone in all the realms share this guilt. And the part of you that is broken by that truth will _always_ belong to me."

"L…Lo…ki… n-no…st… sto… " The black and green began to swirl together, her vision beginning to darken as her brain begged for oxygen that her body couldn't give it.

"Shhh…" he hushed, bringing his other hand up, to stroke her cheek, no longer even visibly reacting to the pain of the magic as it zapped and singed his flesh. Spots were beginning to obscure her vision. She felt him brush his forehead against hers, felt him running his nose along the length of hers in a gesture she might have found uncomfortably intimate if she had enough oxygen left to consider it. "Don't be afraid," he whispered against her cheek. "I could never hurt you. At least…" his lips smirked against her skin, "…not more than I have to. Maybe if we ever meet again, I'll let you slap me for it. Jane…" in the gathering dimness of her mind, she heard his voice thicken with feeling. "…you are my rain." The heat of his skin against hers was the only real sensation left as a haze closed over her senses. "Remember that. Everything depends on you. And I lo…"

The last words didn't reach her as she sank into oblivion.

* * *

**TBC**

* * *

**AN: **My, oh my. So that happened!

Loki has essentially claimed Jane as his co-conspirator; should Jane accept the guilt? After spilling his guts like that, what secrets could he still be keeping? Is unrequited love his only motivation, or is there something else he might be after?

Lots of coffee and very little sleep were involved in this final draft, so if there are any gross grammatical errors, please forgive! Still not quite satisfied with this… hopefully the next chapter will help clarify anything that was confusing here. Comments, questions and constructive criticism are all extremely welcome, help me become a better writer!


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer: **The story and characters of _Thor _belong to Marvel; all original characters and plot are my creation, are not based on real people or events, and are not intended for sale or profit. Please do not repost without permission.

**AN: **This chapter is what happens when you leave your muse's cage unlocked during class; you turn your back for a measly three hours, and when you check again, it's built an entire complex of subplots for you to reconcile. The cheeky little drunk… please enjoy!

.

* * *

_Darkness. Floating in darkness. Green sparks in the darkness. A cold weight on her chest. Blue flames glittering on faceted gold, and the splash of hot rain… rain? No… tears… _

_A soft touch against her forehead… the press of lips… _

_And then… light…_

Jane's eyes flew open. She bolted upright in bed, gasping for air, her hand flying to her throat, grappling for the hand that wasn't there. It encountered only the cool, solid weight of the rune pendant hanging on its cord. She sat there panting for a long moment, trying to collect her panic-scattered thoughts.

_A dream… it really was a dream…_

"A dre… ngh!" she tried to say out loud, but winced, gritting her teeth. Her throat felt sore.

She sucked in a deep breathe, looking around herself. The room was just how she'd left it the night before. The sky, deeply grey in the early morning light, was still spitting fitfully against the window, but the storm was clearly long over. From the corner of her eye, Jane could see the digital clock on the night stand, flashing 12:00, in need of being reset after the power outage during the night.

A power outage… _there was a power outage… and then… _she swallowed hard, grimacing in pain. She tentatively reached up to touch her neck, and hissed in pain as she felt a hot swell of damaged tissue.

Throwing back the covers, she scrambled to her feet and practically ran to the mirror across the room. She stopped short, peering at her reflection; her eyes closed and her stomach clenched up at what she saw.

A swollen, dark blue-black imprint of a long-fingered hand wrapped mercilessly around her throat.

"Not a dream…" she whispered hoarsely against the ache.

Real.

It was tempting to ask the clichéd 'have I gone crazy' questions. Loki should be dead – she had watched him die in Thor's arms. But Jane didn't like to think she was the sort of person so set in their preconceptions that she had to doubt her sanity the moment something challenged her beliefs about reality. Last night had been one thing. But now, she had to face facts. What kind of scientist would she be to do otherwise?

So she would operate under the assumption that she wasn't crazy. And ghosts did not exist. Or if they did, she amended, they probably didn't leave bruises.

_When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable…_

The most likely truth, she was forced to conclude, was that Loki had not, in fact, died on the Dark World.

How he had survived that mortal wound, Jane could not explain. But that hardly mattered at this point. Not twenty-four hours ago, she might have considered that excellent news. But after last night… Her mind skittered nervously away from those memories, and landed instead, on the ones she'd been rehashing the day before, only to find that they all took on uncomfortable new dimensions. Each one filtered into the forefront of her mind through her knew knowledge of Loki.

When he had been arguing with Thor on the flying boat about the pain her mortality would bring, had the bitterness in his voice been all for Thor, or had it been something more?

When he had sheltered her from the Aether's explosion, was it her imagination, or had his touch lingered a few seconds longer than was strictly necessary?

And when he'd pushed her out of the blast radius of the implosion grenade, only to be pulled in himself – when their eyes had locked, and he'd reached out for her, a even though there was no way she could have saved him – what had that look on his face really meant?

And her first memory of him, the most vivid, the one she always thought of first: the smile he'd given her on their first meeting, so self-assured… too self-assured… it suddenly seemed false, forced, designed to conceal rather than express, to distract with vanity whatever might be concealed underneath… And then the way his eyes had tracked her after she'd slapped him, fixed on her like he was mesmerized, that devious, unrepentant smile crooking his lips as he gazed at her, like he was trying to memorize her…

She hugged herself, rubbing her bare arms, suddenly incredibly self conscious, and made herself refocus on the present.

It all made a rather perfect kind of sense in hindsight. Loki had avenged his mother when he killed the Kursed. What was left for him after that, but to go back to his prison cell? Faking his own death meant escape from that incarceration, and making it a hero's death had left him a martyr, remembered in the best possible light and …_how did he put it? 'Free in every sense'_. Now Loki was in the wind, unknown and unsought, while Thor practically sainted him to anyone who would listen. It was not only logical, it was really kind of brilliant. The master strategist, whose mind she'd grown to admire when she thought him dead, still alive and hard at work.

_Stop it, _she ordered herself, realizing that her breaths had become quicker and more shallow the more she thought about him, _you are _not_ allowed to be impressed by him, Jane Foster! Look what he did!_

She felt tear prick at the back of her eyes as a delayed but potent fear started to claw its way past the initial shock of revelation and up out of the pit of her stomach to nip at the base of her intellect. Loki was alive, and he… she tried again to escape the memories of the night before, but they were insidious, slipping in through the cracks while she struggled to breathe normally.

Helpless, defenseless, exposed, the flash of green light slicing the air with ozone.

The hot press of lips on her skin. On her mouth.

A crushing hand clamped around her airway, and the powerless and inevitability of suffocation.

"_All of it… all of it, Jane… all of the suffering and_ _destruction, all the fire and screaming and the blood… all of the killing…all of it was for you._"

The gray square of the window seemed to gape like a hungry mouth that would suck her in and swallow her into the ruin of New York if she dared turn her eyes towards it.

_I am not the cause of it. I can't be._

Two tears rolled down her cheeks anyway.

_I don't want to be._

She kept her eyes fixed firmly on the bruises at her throat, framed by the black cord.

_I won't be. I refuse to be._

She followed the line of the cord down, and her eyes came to rest on the rune pendant. Her face hardened.

Jane wasn't anyone's victim to stand around crying and afraid. Jane was a scientist. She knew that the only way to combat fear was with knowledge. So what did she know?

Loki was alive. Loki claimed to be in love with her. Loki had made some kind of Faustian pact to reach earth, supposedly to win her over, but had lost control of the situation, and possibly control of himself, to this nameless alien overlord. Loki had failed and had been locked up on Asgard, where he claimed his mind had been restored (Jane remained skeptical). Thor had freed him during the Convergence. He had faked his own death. Now he had turned up on Earth, in her hotel room, caught secretly casting spells on her. He had confessed everything. He had kissed her passionately. Then he had choked her out cold. Then he had left her here.

_Why?_

As she chased up and down the timeline, she kept coming back to the fact that Loki knew that she now knew he had faked his own death, but aside from rendering her temporarily unconscious, he had done nothing about it.

Which meant that either he could not do anything about it - or he did not _want_ to do anything about it.

_He clearly didn't want me to know he was alive – he said I'd changed the rules. What does that mean? _

Maybe he really was in love with her, and just wanted to be close to her…?

_Bullshit. _Even if it were true, this was Loki - he always had an angle. _What is he really up to?  
_

She needed more information. More answers.

Jane knew what she should do – she should already be on the phone to Thor, to Stark Industries, to SHIELD, telling them what little she knew. She could see Stark Tower from the window – brilliant minds like Bruce Banner and Tony Stark could help her figure this out, and dangerously skilled soldiers like Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanov would keep her safe. Help, resources and protection were practically within shouting distance. It would crazy to delay.

But…

Her fingers curled around the rune pendant. There were more facts to consider.

Ever since her encounter with the crone on the street, she had felt wrong footed. Something about those women had struck a strange note in her that was still resonating even after all the distractions of last night. They knew something. She could feel it in her bones. Jane needed the help and protection of the Avengers… but she needed answers more. And she had a good idea where she could find a few.

Swinging away from the mirror with renewed purpose, her eye caught on a small, glimmering something sitting inconspicuously on the dresser beside her wallet. Her eyes narrowed as her heart skipped with a moment's panic, but when the object didn't do anything but sit there, innocuous and inert, she sighed and put a hand over her heart, willing herself to quit jumping at shadows.

The object was a small gold disc about three inches across, and half of one high. It was intricately adorned with fine inlaid knotwork patterns, and a number of runes Jane recognized from the website she'd visited yesterday, though she didn't recall their names or uses. A seam ran all around the circumference, indicating that it likely opened somehow, though there was no visible latch. Jane had no idea what it might be. But it definitely hadn't been there the night before.

Wary, she slowly reached out and carefully picked it up. It was surprisingly heavy for something so tiny, and it glittered in the morning light. Upon closer examination, Jane discovered even finer etchings had been filed into the planes of the object, clearly the work of a master craftsman. Whatever it was, it was truly beautiful.

It had to have been left there by Loki.

Jane was tempted to throw it out the window.

The only thing that kept her from actually doing it was an insidiously burning curiosity smoldering relentlessly in the recesses of her mind. It was obviously Asgardian, an object from another world. What was it? What did it do? Was it functional, or was it decorative? Was it something dangerous, or something useful? Was it valuable? Was it a gift? A threat? A bribe? She couldn't just throw it away, it could be dangerous to others – or dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands. She tried to imagine SHIELD finding out she was in possession of an alien artifact, and her fingers tightened around the disc's outer edge until it bit into her skin.

She would go for help. She would.

But first, she was going to get some answers.

* * *

Thirty minutes later, a flannel scarf wrapped around her bruised throat and the gold disc tucked securely in the pocket of her jeans, Jane was on the streets of Manhattan, retracing her steps from the day before. It did not take her long at all to find what she was after. She recognized the cart amongst the vendors that were setting up their stalls along the sidewalk. She spotted the woman from the day before soon enough; Jane was relieved to see that her grandmother wasn't with her today.

Steeling her spine, she marched forward and tapped the woman on the shoulder. The woman turned, a welcoming smile already on her face. As recognition set in, the smile faltered.

"Oh…" she said, uncertain, "Good day."

Jane had to work hard not to scowl when the woman glanced up at her forehead and blanched slightly. Fear had given way to anger about the time Jane had stepped off the hotel elevator, and she preferred it that way.

"Not really," she replied acidly, her voice still creaky and painful. She tugged the rune pendant out from under her shirt, dislodging the scarf in the process. Much as she hated to admit the thing might have any magical properties, she couldn't bring herself to take it off. "What the hell is this thing?"

The woman's eyebrows shot up as she looked down at the pendant, then widened as she caught sight of the bruising at Jane's neck beyond. She looked up at Jane, back at her neck, up at her forehead and back to the pendant.

"You had better come inside."

Jane was all ready to argue, but then she glanced around to notice people starting to stare, including a police officer buying coffee from a nearby Starbucks cart. She nodded grudgingly and allowed the woman to lead her into the shadow of one of the boarded-up storefronts, and through a weather-beaten wooden door that didn't quite hang square in its frame. The woman shouted something up the staircase just inside in that same foreign language Jane had heard the day before. She thought it might be a Scandinavian dialect, but she couldn't be sure. A moment later, a burly man with close cropped dark hair and a single, bushy unibrow crawling across his square face lumbered down the stairs and, glancing briefly at Jane, moved past them to take up a station next to the cart. The woman nodded to him, then turned and ascended the stairs. After a hesitant moment, Jane followed, her need for answers outweighing her wariness of entering a strange building alone with a stranger.

The staircase opened into a rectangular living space that appeared to function as living room, dinging room and kitchen all in one. Doors were set along the back wall, presumably leading to bedrooms or bathrooms. High windows interrupted at intervals by floor-length drapes lined the wall facing the street, leading Jane to believe the apartment had once been a shop. The air was heavy with the aroma of some unfamiliar spice. All of the furniture, from the scuffed dining table to the sagging sofas, was mismatched and rather obviously second-hand. They appeared to be alone for the moment; Jane was again grateful that the grandmother wasn't around. Jane hadn't realized just how much the old woman had spooked her until she felt a wave of relief that she wasn't up their waiting for them.

"Look, I need to know what's going on," she demanded as she halted inside the door. "I woke up in the middle of the night… sort of… to flashing green lights everywhere and the rather spectacular mood swings of… of an acquaintance, who is supposed to be dead. And it all started when you handed me this necklace. You know something. I can tell by the way you keep looking at me." She huffed out a sigh, throwing up her hands, and then motioning at her throat. "You said to wear the rune for protection." She was slightly horrified to realize that she was near tears, her anger crumbling as she vented her frustrations. "It didn't exactly do its job. So, what gives?"

"Yes," the woman said vaguely. She motioned to one of two dilapidated sofas facing each other across a stained coffee table. "Please sit."

She moved to a stove on the far side of the room, pulling down a teapot from above it and spooning some dried herb from a glass jar into it. Jane vacillated for a moment, then gave in and sank onto the faded floral pattern of one of the dilapidated sofas. She watched the woman add water from a lazily steaming kettle on the stove, then pulled down two mugs and a small jar of sugar cubes.

"Perhaps, in retrospect, I should have given you a talisman for _algiz_. It may have provided a truer barrier, instead of merely a deterrent." She opened the refrigerator, pulling out a carton of milk and pouring a measure into a small pitcher. "But it sounds as though served its intended purpose.

"Care to enlighten me as to its true purpose?" Jane demanded, recovering quickly. "What good is a magical protection necklace that doesn't protect you from anything?"

"I gave you the _hagalaz _to protect you from secrecy," she replied. "To inactivate the spell that was shrouding your senses while you slept. To repel uninvited contact as well, but more to remove unwelcome influence. Like a sleeping spell." She shot Jane a meaningful look. "I did not wish to block the god's ability to interact with you – I wished to force him to face you."

Jane narrowed her eyes at her, and her mouth fell open, confused and a little incensed.

"You seem to know a lot more about what's going on in my life than I do." she seethed accusingly.

"I know only what I see."

"What does _that _mean?"

The woman ignored her. "I wanted you to be able to decide for yourself," she said decisively. "The women of my family have seldom been allowed a chance to choose. Their fates were thrust upon them. I would not take the choice from you if I could help it." She shrugged almost self-consciously. "Perhaps it was a mistake."

Memories of seeing the hotel room with her eyes still closed made Jane's head spin. Magic talismans defying the laws of nature? Sleeping spells and green lightning? Complete strangers who knew things they shouldn't? It defied logic. _What is logic anymore? All of this defies logic._ _However improbable…_

"What… what was I supposed to decide?" she asked faintly. How was she supposed to decide on anything when she didn't even know the rules of the game she was playing, much less the stakes?

"Your own fate," the woman said. "Grandmother was right to warn you. The touch of a god is always a dangerous thing. But a danger is not always an evil. You had the right to judge that for yourself."

_Of course it's evil! _she thought automatically… then had to pause as she reflected on that thought. And on her memories of him – from the Dark World and from the night before, of all he had told her, all he had endured, and why he had done what he had done, all the mourning she had seen in Thor...Was it so simply black and white? Or had it been so dark last night that she couldn't see the shades of gray…? _Is it evil? Or is it just dangerous? How do I tell…? _

_He strangled me. Evil. _

And yet... _Is that more bias?_ After everything he had done that had failed to drive her to hate him, was it okay to decide he was really pure evil based on that one act? An act which happened to be perpetrated against her? _Am I heartless, being so eager to condemn him just for what he did to me? __Or have I been a complete idiot to even consider excusing what he has been doing all along?__  
_

Jane shook her head, dispelling the shades of gray that threatened to overrun the banks of her memories. Now was not the moment.

"What else was your grandmother right about? Am I…" Jane grimaced, unable to believe the words about to come out of her mouth. "Am I cursed?"

The woman leaned her hip on the counter and cocked her head, for the first time staring openly at whatever she kept looking at on Jane's face.

"The mark upon you may yet prove to be a blessing. Or a curse. Maybe both." She shook her head. "Grandmother assumes the god cursed you because she believes _she_ is cursed. She cannot see beyond the wounds of her own heart. I am not so eager to assume I know the mind of the god."

"Loki is not a god!" Jane snapped. The woman's eyes flashed wide at the mention of Loki's name, and she turned back to the counter, fidgeting with the tea things. "And what _mark_? You mean on my forehead, don't you? You keep staring at it, but there's nothing there!"

"There is nothing that _you_ can see."

She hefted the tea tray and carried it to the coffee table. Turning back, she opened a drawer in a bureau next to the staircase and pulled out an old brass hand mirror. She wordlessly handed it to Jane and moved around behind the couch.

"Look," she instructed, standing behind Jane and stooping so that both their faces were visible in the mirror.

Jane didn't see anything.

She reached past Jane and touched the rim of the mirror. "_Laguz," _she whispered. The tip of her finger glowed with green for an instant, and the mirror face flashed with green in response.

And suddenly Jane could see it.

A symbol, gleaming with an icy blue glow, had been cut into the skin of her forehead. She gasped, reaching up to touch it. The skin was slightly raised around the cut, though there was no pain, and the edges felt warm and clean. It wasn't an illusion. It was _there._

_"Uruz,_" the woman told her, her eyes thougthful. "See how it is not laid on your skin, but is cut into it, the magic threaded into the wound. Hmmm… no wonder he wanted you to sleep. Not merely secrecy."

"But… it wasn't there before…"

"It was," the woman replied quietly. "You just weren't meant to see it." The woman's eyes narrowed as she examined the mark in the mirror. "It was incomplete yesterday. Now it is not…" Her eyes flicked down to the bruising at Jane's neck, and when they came back up to meet Jane's, they had hardened with regret. "I am sorry…"

Jane barely heard her. She stared, fixated, trying to absorb the presence of this mark on her body, the fact that it had been there all along, and the fact she had not been aware of it. There was something viscerally disturbing about the idea. So this was why Loki had been in her room, rendering her unconscious with magic, and when that failed, with brute force. The edges were surgically precise. The magic inside glowed like crystalline blue fire. Her jaw clenched as she fed her growing fear to her curiosity. What was it? What did it mean? What did it do? Was it dangerous? Harmful? Permanent?

And how could these women see it, when no one else could?

Jane pried her eyes away from the glowing mark to stare into the reflection of the woman's eyes.

"Who _are_ you?"

The woman walked around the couch and sat down beside Jane. She silently poured the tea, adding milk and sugar to Jane's cup as well as her own. Pressing one warm cup into Jane's free hand, she took a sip her own before settling back and pinning Jane with a serious look.

"My name is Alexa Solberg," she said at length, seeming to weigh each word carefully before it left her mouth. "I have, perhaps, caused you trouble. Because of this, I will tell you our story."

Jane opened her mouth, then closed it, resisting the urge pepper the woman with more questions. This wasn't a social call, it was an expedition to gather information – not share it. She sipped her tea, the warmth and flavor of which she found instantly soothing, and made herself listen instead.

"Over a thousand years ago," Alexa began, "the gods descended from the skies and did battle against the Frost Giant armies that had come to enslave the Earth. During a lull in battle, one of the sons of Odin walked amongst the people of a nearby village, and met a woman, whom he took for a lover."

"The sons of Odin?" Jane felt her ears perk up, before she took a purposeful sip of her tea, trying to look unconcerned. "Er… which one? Thor or Loki?"

The woman shook her head, and gave Jane a knowing sidelong look.

"Baldur," she replied. At Jane's blank look, she elaborated, "He was the first born son of the Allfather. It does not surprise me that you do not know him. He was killed in battle long ago. Though his name has survived human lore, and it was stricken from all song on Asgard after his death."

"What?" That wasn't right. The Asgardians glorified people who died in battle. "Why?"

"There was a relic in the Asgardian treasure room, a jewel of great power. The Cosmic Cube. Odin desired to use it in the war against the Frost Giants. But while the gods had some knowledge of its uses, no one truly understood its power, or _how_ it worked."

"You mean the Tesseract!" Jane exclaimed, her mind racing. Alexa nodded.

"The Cosmic Cube is volatile and ill-understood. Those who, in their arrogance, have used it to achieve their goals have almost always brought about cataclysmic side effects."

"That's an understatement," Jane muttered, recalling the images from the news reports of the smoke and fire and destruction immediately after the Chitauri invasion.

"Yes, but it is more fundamental than you realize." Alexa cocked her head thoughtfully. "Imagine a group of uneducated citizens who discovered a working nuclear power plant nearby their homes. They knew enough to understand that if they pulled certain levers and pressed certain buttons, it provided their city with light, heat, water, all sorts of fantastic benefits. But they had not enough understanding to fathom the source of the energy, how it worked, how it could be maintained – or how to contain it if something should go wrong."

Jane nodded, catching on. "It would be tempting to use it, but the results of messing with it could be devastating."

"Exactly," Alexa concurred. "And so it was with the Aesir and the Tesseract. Its power is _almost_ without equal, but without a clear understanding of the Cube's nature, even the gods could easily shred the very fabric of the universe." She sipped her tea, her eyes distant.

"Baldur was far-seeing, and he feared the Cube's power, the destruction it could cause, even in the hands of one as wise as his father. So when Odin sent him to retrieve it and bring it into battle, he instead stole the Cube. He secretly placed it in the hands of his mortal lover, before he went back to the front line. That very day, he was slain in battle. And though the day ended in victory, many died, and Odin Allfather's eye was taken from him. The massive death toll was blamed on Baldur's betrayal. Worst of all, he had told none where he had secreted the Cube, and he had instructed his lover never to reveal the Cube to anyone, not even the king of the gods. For these crimes, his name was made forbidden, and his memory banished from verse. And for a thousand years, the stolen relic was never seen or heard of again."

Alexa paused for a breath, pressing her lips together as though wary of speaking the words she held behind them.

"This is my family's story, and secret," she said at last. "The faithful woman resided in the village known as Tonsberg, in Norway. Her name was Stella Solberg. She was my ancestor."

Jane sat up straighter, looking at Alexa with new eyes as a piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

"You're Asgardian!" she exclaimed.

"Mostly human," Alexa replied with another self-conscious shrug. "Many generations have passed since then. But yes, my family line is directly descended from the gods. And sometimes," she gestured towards the mirror, "we show signs of their magic. Magic, we believe, which was given to us for a purpose. You see, since that day so long ago, my family's sacred duty, handed down from the mouth of Baldur himself, was to hide the Cube for all time, passing it down the maternal line from mother to daughter, and to protect the Realms from its influence."

Jane thought she understood now what Alexa had meant, when she said the women of her family had rarely been given a choice in their own fates. The weight of that kind of legacy had to be overwhelming.

"My great-grandfather was the last keeper of the Cube. When Johann Schmidt discovered its hiding place in 1942, he murdered my grandfather and great-grandfather in cold blood, and ordered the destruction of the village and all its in habitants." She held the teacup close to her face, almost hiding behind it, her brow tightening. "My grandmother was a young woman then. Though she was raised from infancy with this duty before her, to defend the Cube unto the very last drop of Baldur's blood, she felt herself to be a wife and mother first. She had two young children, and could do nothing against Hydra's tanks and weapons. So when she saw that her father and husband were dead, and that the Cube was already in the hands of evil men, she did not lay down her life in a futile effort to retake it. Instead, she took my mother and uncle and she ran."

"She escaped into the wilderness as the village burned, and made her way south, then west, and eventually joined a train of refugees from the war; very soon they boarded a boat to Manhattan, where they settled. Here." She gestured to the old brick and plaster walls around them. "So our family escaped Hydra, but lost the Cube." Alexa shook her head sadly. "To this day, Grandmother cannot forgive herself for choosing her life and her family over her duty."

"That's crazy!" Jane interjected vehemently, absorbed in the story. "I mean, of course she chose to save her children! She shouldn't be ashamed!"

"Your sentiment is appreciated," Alexa said with a small, sad smile, "and we have consoled her with such talk again and again. But it is her faith. Grandmother cannot bear that she failed the god, our sire. It is her great shame, which she carries to this day. When…" her voice thickened suddenly, and she had to clear her throat before she continued. "When the Trickster descended with his dark army, the Cube in his grasp, Grandmother tried to throw herself to the Chitauri invaders. She believed that this was her punishment for her weakness. That we would all suffer and die for her failure." She offered Jane a watery smile. "It was only the sight of the Thunderer brandishing Mjolnir that allowed us to convince her to take shelter. If not for that…" Alexa closed her eyes, remembering. "The gods doing battle. It is a sight I will never forget."

"Wow…" Jane looked down into her teacup, horrified. And ashamed.

Loki's voice echoed in her head. _"All of it was for you"_

She swallowed hard. _It's not my fault. He chose to do this, not me. _But perhaps she knew more about what Alexa's grandmother was feeling than she liked to admit. Because even though it wasn't really her fault, she couldn't help the cloying guilt that threatened to close her throat.

"It has been a year since that time," Alexa said. "When Grandmother saw the mark upon your brow as you walked the street…" she shrugged. "Another woman beloved of the gods, set to drown in the beginnings of a heavy destiny not of her own making… For her, it was as though she was seeing our ancestor, Stella, walking out of time. She held a hope that perhaps she could still absolve some measure of her shame by helping you avoid the trials our family has endured. That is why she accosted you. And the reason why I gave you _hagalaz _in her place."

Jane sat back, clutching her mug, and glanced down into the mirror. The blue mark glared back at her. All this talk of gods and magic… She had come for answers, and she was getting them, but they weren't what she expected. She wanted hard proof, measurable data, a solution she could test and control. This was all beyond her experience and understanding. It left her feeling lost, adrift.

Memories from the night before, lightening and thunder, pounding rain, green light and the low, accented tones telling her sad, strange, terrible things. His hand at her throat. His lips against hers. She swallowed hard, suddenly acutely aware of her own body. Of her mouth, and her throat. Now that she knew the mark was on her forehead, she thought maybe she could feel that too. Tingling. Warm. Energetic. _Inside. _ She shivered.

"What is this thing?" she asked, gesturing towards her head, almost reluctant to know. Her voice broke over the last word, and she took a scalding gulp of her tea to brace herself. "What did he do to me?"

"I do not think he has done anything to you. The mark seems dormant right now, very quiet… but _uruz, _like _hagalaz,_ isa mark of the Trickster. Perhaps nothing more than a sign of possession. A warning to those who would harm you."

Jane stared blankly at Alexa for a long moment. Her face darkened.

"Are you saying he _branded _me?" For the first time, Jane decided definitively that it was a good thing Loki was alive; she needed him alive, so that she could _kill _him.

"No! No, not as such…" Alexa said hurriedly, eying Jane's furious expression warily. "_Uruz _is powerful magic. I strongly suspect that any one who tried to lay hands on you in harm would be repelled. Possibly in much the same way he was repelled by the pendant. Possibly in a much different way. Whatever the case… I strongly suspect they would regret it."

"You said 'uruz'? That's another rune, right?"

Alexa pursed her lips, casting a sidelong look at Jane. Her expression said she was once again weighing her words.

"_Uruz _is the symbol of the aurochs," she said.

"Auroch… that's an extinct species of wild oxen…"

Jane remembered reading about them in her evolutionary biology class during her second degree program. Aurochs, massive, volatile and incredibly dangerous wild oxen similar to modern longhorn bulls, had once roamed all over the European continent. It was said that the average auroch was only slightly smaller than average African elephant, with horns that grew up to six feet in length. Jane could barely imagine such a creature; they must have been truly fearsome to behold.

Alexa nodded. "The auroch is a symbol of great strength."

"So what does the rune mean?"

Alexa sipped her tea, thinking again. Jane waited with poor patience, tapping her foot slightly against the threadbare rug.

"_Uruz,_" she finally said, "is complex. It is a mark of wildness, but may also mean the taming of that wildness. Its meanings depends on its context, but among them are…" she glanced at Jane, then away, "primitive irrationality, bestial strength, primal instinct, intuition. It may also be invoked as part of the ritual of the hunt, or as a rite of passage or initiation … And then…" she grimaced, clearly uncomfortable, "it may also represent raw passion. Unabashed sexual hunger. Desire that drives one beyond rationality." She hid her face behind her mug, taking a much longer and slower drink than was necessary. If Erik was any model for Scandanavian culture, she was probably embarrassed and trying not to show it.

Jane was plenty embarrassed herself. In her memory, Loki's voice echoed in the dark, his eyes so fervent she could barely remember them without squirming, his words impossible in their revelations…

Alexa cleared her throat.

"It, ah, has another meaning, more esoteric, less well understood."

"Oh?" Jane replied faintly, her face flaming.

"Yes. _Uruz _may also mean 'rain'," she said.

Jane started upright, nearly dropped her mug. A few drops of hot tea splashed over the lip to sting her fingers.

"_You are my rain."_

Alexa caught the movement, eyeing Jane curiously, and continued.

"As I said, _uruz _may mean wildness, or it may mean the taming of wildness. My understanding after much study is that, if _uruz _is to represent the wild strength of the auroch, fires of passion, and the dangerous chaos of irrationality, it is also to represent the will that tames it, the rain that quenches it, and the power that conquers and cleanses orders and stabilizes it. It is both the sickness, and the cure."

Jane swallowed hard, trying desperately to banish his words from echoing inside her head. The harder she tried, of course, the more her mind circled that memory, bringing it into sharper focus, cementing it, forming neuronal bridges, building and extrapolating all sorts of implications, meanings, and worse, emotions… She stared at the mark, an array of questions welling up in the back of her throat, ready to spill from her lips. The queries vied viciously for a place on the tip of her tongue, each more crucially important than the last. So she was surprised by the question that finally won out when she at last rediscovered her ability to speak.

"Why is it blue?" Alexa's eyebrows rose questioningly. Jane's cheeks colored slightly, but she stood by the question. "All of the… the so-called _magic _I've seen always involves green light. But this is blue. Why?"

"Observant," Alexa commented. "It is not merely blue. It is the very same blue fire that is emitted by the Cosmic Cube. I would know it anywhere. It is the magic of the Tesseract."

Jane looked up at her sharply.

"As I said, no one truly understands the magic of the Cube. It is unlike Asgardian magic, Elven magic, Giantkind's magic, or human magic. But it seems clear that the Trickster knows more than most about its secrets."

Jane's jaw clenched against the urge to panic, recalling Eric's ineffable brokenness after the Tesseract had influenced him…

"So why is he using blue magic to put a mark on me?" She was proud of how calm and even her voice sounded. She tried to say, 'am I being influenced?', but she couldn't bring her self to ask. "When he tried to put that sleeping spell on me, the magic was green. Why use the Tesseract's magic for this?"

Alexa shook her head. "I do not know."

"Damn it…" Jane whispered, staring hard at her reflection, willing the answers to come together in the eerie blue glow. "What does he _want _from me…"

"That is why I gave you _hagalaz. _So that you could discover the answer."

"Can you get rid of it?"

The words were out of Jane's mouth before she knew she'd spoken. She hadn't meant to say them. Reflecting over them, she felt a sickening mix of relief and reluctance. It felt like asking a barber to do brain surgery. But if the Tesseract had anything to do with this mark, if there was even an outside chance that it might be poisoning her mind…

Alexa looked away, troubled.

"I do not believe I should…" She looked up at the mark, clearly as wary of interfering with the magic as Jane, but at the tight, troubled expression pinching Jane's face, she sighed. "Come closer. I cannot promise this is a good idea. But I will try."

Jane let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. Sitting forward, she set aside the mirror and her mug. Alexa did the same, pulling in a slow deep breath and releasing it as she reached for the mark on Jane's forehead. The tips of her fingers glimmered with green fire.

Before she could do more than brush the skin of Jane's temple, there was a crackling noise, and then a deafening, ringing whine filled the air, like feedback from a microphone. Both women screwed their faces up in pain, scrambling to their feet as the light from the windows darkened. Jane thought a massive cloud front must have passed across the sun, until she looked around and realized that the lamp in the far corner of the room had dimmed as well, as though some invisible fog had fallen over all the surrounding light sources, blocking them out.

"Jane."

The bottom dropped out of Jane's stomach as her head jerked towards the voice. Her eyes stretched wide and her face went slack as her hand crept unconsciously up to grip the rune pendant hanging from her neck like a lifeline.

He materialized from empty air like a specter emerging from a shadowy corner of the room. His gaze burned through her like a wave of fire, so that she staggered back a step from the force of it before she caught herself. Her heart raced between terror and adrenaline, and her mind spun with all the battering gale of a hurricane. But her voice, when she spoke, emerged from the still, calm eye of that raging storm, which twisted around the one fact she fully understood: the name of the man in front of her.

"Loki."

* * *

**TBC**

* * *

**AN: **Goodness, they have to stop meeting like this… by which I mean in cliffhangers. So we have a mysterious gift, a mysterious mark, a mysterious woman with a mysterious story. And Loki. Or is it?

So sorry for the late update, life has been crazy. Graduating from nursing school is _extremely_ time consuming. Thank you so much for all of your reviews, I am so grateful for the feedback! Please continue to tell me your thoughts, your comments and critiques, and if you have questions, I will do my utmost to answer them in a timely manner!

A reminder: the runes referenced in this story are based on real runic meanings, but some aspects may be embellished or uniquely interpreted for the purposes of this story.

My muse has been up late, swinging through the rafters and binging on booze while I waste brain cells on six hour blocks of N-CLEX practice tests; he needs to consume something nutritious before he starves to death. Your reviews may mean the difference between more Loko/Jane stories, and a pickled monkey carcass clinging to the neck of a cranberry vodka bottle. Please, think of the monkey.


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer: **The story and characters of _Thor _belong to Marvel; all original characters and plot are my creation, are not based on real people or events, and are not intended for sale or profit. Please do not repost without permission.

**AN: **So very sorry for taking so long to update! I've been living in an ICU waiting room for the past week while my mom recovered from kidney failure, so my muse has been hiding from reality under a rock for a while. But she is doing better now, and he has poked his head out and is ready to play again. Apologies if this chapter has some idiosyncrasies, since I've been a tad distracted. If you notice any mistakes or otherwise nonsensical writing, please feel free to point it out to me, so that I can avoid such mistakes in the future and become a better writer!

This is the last chapter of Part I! Please enjoy the show!

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* * *

Jane was transported momentarily in her mind back to the dark hotel room, the raging of the storm outside, and the helplessness of being trapped in a small room with a dangerous predator. It was just like the night before, but now she was seeing him with her waking eyes. Her throat tightened and burned, and she tried to back away, whimpering.

Alexa's hand shot out and clasped her wrist tightly, and Jane tore her eyes away from the intruder long enough to shoot an incredulous look at the woman beside her.

"It is a sending," Alexa said, her voice small and tense as she fought to control her own knee-jerk panic. "Just a sending."

"A what?" Jane asked, her voice high and tight.

"An image. Like… like… a recording or… like a hologram, from that Star Trek show. You can speak to him, and he will speak back, but he's not really here."

Jane swallowed and looked back at Loki, and couldn't quite believe it. He looked entirely real, entirely _here. _

Alexa reached blindly behind herself and grasped one of the pillows on the couch. With a level of courage worthy of her Asgardian ancestors, she threw it at Loki. Jane let out a shuddering breath as it passed directly through his chest and tumbled to the ground behind him. _Like a ghost, _Jane thought, then squeezed her eyes shut for a long moment.

He was still there when she opened them again.

"Not real," she murmured, dizzied by the adrenaline racing through her veins.

"Real enough," Loki replied smoothly, a mocking smirk lighting his face.

Jane was proud that she didn't shriek at the sound of his voice.

"If you can see me, it means you're trying to unwork my magic," he continued, raising his chin and cocking his eyebrow at her in a chiding manner, as though daring her to deny it. "A word to the wise, my love," he caught her eye and held it hard for a heartbeat. "Don't."

"Are you kidding?" she snapped, the words out of her mouth before she could think about them, her voice shaking, but full of more bravado than she could make herself believe she felt. "There's a glowing blue cut on my forehead! Nothing's going to stop me from getting rid of it!"

"I can, if I must," he told her coolly. "I think you know that."

Jane blanched at the frighteningly vague threat. She didn't quite know what he meant, but she had no doubt whatsoever that Loki had a number of tricks he had yet to reveal, and a great deal of doubt that she would like any of them.

"You wouldn't dare."

Loki smirked at her.

"You have no idea what I would dare," he warned her. "Not yet."

Jane felt her throat try to close with fear. She cleared it quietly, trying to gather herself. She had come here for her answers; she couldn't let fear keep her from asking questions.

"Then what is it, at least?" she demanded in the steadiest, most commanding voice she could manage. "What did you do to me? Did you…" she shook her head, and made herself say the words. "Is it like what you did to Erik? Are you trying to control me?"

"Of course not," Loki replied, shaking his head, his eyes growing serious, his tone indisputable. "You are _not_ made to be ruled, Jane. You deserve to rule others. You are meant to be a queen."

Jane clenched her jaw, trying to focus on the question at hand and ignore his unsolicited and unnerving opinions.

"So then what is it?"

"Something you were never meant to know about. Something complicated. Something I am… ashamed of." He shook his head, glancing away from her, as though he truly were embarrassed. "It is my failure," he looked back at her, and his eyes were as sincere as she'd ever seen them, "and my vow."

"Stop talking in riddles," Jane cried, working hard to keep from stamping her foot in frustration. She hated that look in his eyes; it made it impossible to write him off as a villain. "This isn't a game! Stop being mysterious and just answer the question!"

"Stop being mysterious? But you love mysteries," Loki replied, a teasing smile curving one side of his mouth. "You love the search for knowledge, don't you? The puzzles and the riddles and the secret realities that elude you and lead you ever on?" His voice dropped to almost a seductive purr as he described her cool, clinical, scientific curiosity in a manner that made it seem almost decadent in its pleasures – described it in a way that said he understood the temptation personally. "Come, tell me the truth, Jane. You would grow bored if the answers lay placidly at your feet to be plucked like berries from the vine. It is the _hunt_ for knowledge that drives you, not the answers themselves."

He grinned wolfishly at her. Jane felt suddenly breathless under his scrutiny. Under the weight of how right he was. She loved the _pursuit _of knowledge, not merely the possession of it. The thrill of discovery after a long search. The triumph of wresting a new secret from the jaws of the unknown.

To be seen with such naked clarity jarred her all the way down to her bones. No one, except maybe Erik or her father, had ever understood. Not like this.

"As long as I am a mystery," Loki finished, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction, "you will be certain think of me. So why would I want to be anything else?"

The barb shook Jane from the fugue his exposition had left her in. His amusement slackened as he glanced down to where her hands balled up into fists, then back up to the quiet fear and resentment burning in her eyes. He pursed his lips and sighed, a measure of his teasing demeanor melting away to reveal a shade of practical honesty underneath. He gave her a level look.

"Suffice it to say, I cannot have you walking around unprotected while I cannot be by your side," he said plainly. "I need to know you are safe. This magic will ensure it."

"I don't need your protection, or anyone else's."

"Yes, you do." Loki shook his head ruefully. "You don't understand the appeal of your own nature. You shine so brightly, Jane. Too brightly. Dark things cannot help but be drawn to your light. I will not see you dimmed by their touch, so long as I can prevent it."

Jane wanted to argue, but couldn't. She'd attracted _his _attention, after all.

"Okay, well, I appreciate the sentiment, but whatever happens, Thor will protect me," she replied. "So this mark is redundant, and you can get rid of it. _Now._"

Loki laughed at that; the sound was startling. Filled with real amusement, genuine mirth. And unexpectedly warm, coming from him.

"Thor is off hauling rubble with day laborers, while his villainous adoptive brother infiltrates his lady's chambers by night." He shook his head, still chuckling. "No, him I will trust least of all to keep you safe."

Jane opened her mouth, a retort about Thor's strength and capability ready on the tip of her tongue, but she snapped it shut and fought not to jump when he suddenly moved, stepping forward and walking right through the far sofa, coming to a stop directly in front of her, his lower legs still half inside the coffee table.

"I told you, Jane," he said, his voice and presence all the realer for his closeness. His eyes studied her face, familiar yet fascinated, as though she too had become more real to him with her nearness. "Thor divides his affections. You can't ever say I didn't warn you. My devotion, on the other hand, is whole and focused. Now that I have the means, I will trust your safety to no one else. Besides," he smirked dangerously, "there isn't much you can do to stop me. My skill is not so slight that my magic can be brushed away by such a meager might as your Midgardian sorcerer can produce. I should think after last night that would be apparent. The only reason he is still breathing after touching my mark is that his power was too weak pose a true threat."

His eyes brushed away from hers scanning the room without focusing on anything. They passed right over Alexa, who was standing, pale and wide-eyed, not three feet in front of him. He scowled into the middle distance.

"I know you are there, magician," he said. His voice was completely different than when he spoke to Jane; all the softness and warmth leached out of it, infusing his insidiously alluring tones with hard, icy ruthlessness. The alteration was jarring. "Try again to step between me and what is mine and I don't care how weak you are, I will shred you atom by atom."

"He can't see you?" Jane muttered out of the side of her mouth to Alexa, unable to tear her gaze away from the image of the man before her. Jane thought she saw a nervous shake of the head from the corner of her eye, but Alexa didn't seem to be capable of speaking, after being threatened by one of her deities.

"Alas," he said ruefully, turning his attention back to Jane, his manner softening again almost instantly – she was struck again by the transformation, "I stand here exposed for all to see, but, as has long been the case, my eyes are for you alone, Jane. In this form, nothing else in all the worlds is real. Only you"

Jane pursed her lips, shaking off the flowery words. They were getting harder and harder to ignore.

"I'm not 'yours'. You don't get to claim ownership of me."

His brow furrowed, and he glanced down, his expression almost shy. "A man can dream," he murmured quietly.

He looked back up at her with a smile so charming she almost caught herself blushing. She narrowed her eyes instead.

"You know what?" she said as coldly as possible. "I don't buy this whole lover act for an instant." It was only partly a lie. "You think you can distract me with it, but that's all it is. Misdirection so I won't dig deeper and figure out what you're really up to."

Loki's eyes burned into her as he let the words hang in the air between them. Jane worked hard not to fidget. How could anyone stare at someone else so hard? After a moment, he apparently couldn't bear it any longer either, because his eyes lowered, his expression growing thoughtful. He smirked ruefully.

"Such is the danger of using lies to tell the truth," he murmured, half to himself. "When you do at last tell the plain, honest truth, everyone calls you a liar." He turned his eyes on her again, all trace of his ever-mocking smile long gone, and his eyes were dead serious. "If you would allow it, I would spend the rest of your life proving you wrong."

Jane tried to find some biting retort, but the intensity of his expression and the tone of his voice were too much for her to answer. For a famed liar, the man was being way too honest. She swallowed hard, meeting his eyes as best she could, and tried to accept what he was saying. It was the only way she was going to be able to counter him.

With that acceptance came a kind of release. The weight of everything she had learned and experienced in the past two days – or maybe in the past two years – seemed to fall on her all at once, leaving her feeling too exhausted for anxiety. A measure of tension leeched out of her, for no other reason than she couldn't hold on to it any longer. She sighed, and looked up at him almost pleadingly.

"Just tell me what you want."

Loki lifted his eyebrows almost playfully.

"You."

Jane fought not to roll her eyes.

"Yeah? What else?"

Loki smiled. Slow, sly and secretive. Obviously. And therefore challengingly. Against her will, it sparked her curiosity. Like a predator scenting its prey, charged by the instinct to chase it down. Even knowing he was doing it on purpose couldn't kill that innate desire to _know_.

"I want what you want," he replied, intentionally unhelpful, his whole air projecting a mocking feigned innocence. "And I want you to want what I want. Have I not said so again and again?"

Her eyes narrowed again, and he cocked an eyebrow in return.

"Do not look at me so, dearest Jane. You wound me." He pressed his hand to his chest with an air of hurt that she thought was only partly facetious. An echo of that accusation he'd directed at her the night before had returned. "I would have spared you the burden of this knowledge, these confusing questions and the hard decisions to come. But you, not I, chose to change the rules. I have merely acted within the bounds of your decisions." A kind of frustrated longing, edged with pain and something like wonder, softened in the lines of his face. "I can never predict you as I can others. You are as much a mystery to me as I am to you. And I too love a mystery."

His expression grew introspective. "How to make you understand... The truth is, I am glad you forced my hand. It was... such a _relief_ to finally speak openly to someone." He refocused on her. "And to reveal my true heart to you. Worth the risk in every way. To think now that you might never have known how I love you…" He closed his eyes briefly, as though the idea were too terrible to consider. When he opened them again, his eyes were so clear and calm and sure that Jane felt herself arrested by them. "You saved me from that fate. You have saved me over and over again. And perhaps, Jane… perhaps you can save me once more. And save many more with me. That is what I want. If you will do it. The future is in your hands now. My gift to you. Everything turns upon your desire."

A sweeping statement, Jane acknowledged, turning it over in her mind. An all encompassing answer. Moving, frightening, alluring. _But ultimately meaningless. _He wasn't going to tell her anything of value. Not like this. He was going to make her hunt him, and he would do everything in his power to elude her, even as he drew her on. It frustrated her. And, in the secret recesses of her mind, she allowed herself to acknowledge that it kind of thrilled her.

"Is that so?" she said, trying to lace her words with as much spite as she could muster. "Well if its up to me, I guess you won't mind when I tell the Thor and the other Avengers all about your miraculous return from the grave."

Loki's smile became cautious, but remained intent. He cocked his head, weighing and measuring her mettle.

"That is one choice," he said slowly. "And there is another: don't look for me." He smirked more broadly at the return of Jane's incredulous expression. "Don't have Thor look for me either. Or your Midgardian sorcerer. Or your Midgardian champions."

"What could possibly delude you into thinking I would keep your secrets for you?" Jane asked, reaching up without really meaning to, to run a careful hand over the black and blue swelling on her throat.

Loki's expression stiffened and his eyes flicked away. A subtle display of discomfort, but Jane felt a little stab of satisfaction anyway. _You _should_ feel guilty, you jerk. _It was gone quickly though, almost immediately replaced by another challenging smirk.

"You want to make right what was wrong. Heal what's been broken. I know you do. If keeping my secrets would accomplish that, wouldn't it be worth it?"

He eyed her thoughtfully, penetratingly, and again she felt like she was standing naked in front of him, and he could see all of her, while himself remained fully clothed in secrets and half-truths. Her mouth ran dry as it occurred to her that she wanted to strip them away, make him as naked as she was, see all of him, learn him, know him inside and out…

_Stop it. STOP it._

"Besides," he went on blithely, "I have no desire to be found. So you will not find me. All a search would produce is frustration and uncertainty and trouble. There is no need for that. For anyone. For now, I want you to have peace, Jane." His smile turned teasing, a wicked light entering his eyes. "After all, who knows how much longer I will allow it will last."

Anger bubbled up inside her, frothing higher with embarrassment and anxiety, consuming fear and giving back fury. It burst through the veneer of weariness as she felt the weight of the destroyed city settle on her shoulders once more, compounded by the pain in her throat, and her broken peace of mind. She found herself taking a step forward, advancing on him, and reveling in a little thrill as he took a reflexive half step backwards in response.

"They stopped you once," she snapped. "They can do it again. Whatever you have planned, you won't succeed."

Her confidence flagged an instant later as he chuckled quietly, delighted amusement sparking in his expression. His eyes danced over her face, avid, as though devouring her defiant expression, where before they had only rested intently on her expressions of anxiety and weariness. Enjoying the fight in her far more than he had enjoyed her fear, she realized.

She remembered the way he'd grinned when she'd slapped him on Asgard. "_I like her." _ She felt her cheeks heat.

His expression remained engaged, his lips quirked in a kind of lopsided smile that might have almost been enchanting if she didn't know what a complete bastard he was, and his eyes narrowed with knowing as he registered her embarrassment. But when he spoke his voice was calm, steady and entirely matter-of-fact.

Which made his words all the more frightening.

"My only plans for the foreseeable future involve remaining undetected and staying out of trouble. At present, my situation is a stable one. I have no immediate desire to alter it. If I am forced into the open, however…" he hummed in mock thoughtfulness under his breath, "…who _knows_ what could happen?" He took a step closer and leaned in so that they were nearly nose to nose. "Are you so eager to burn another world with me, Jane?"

The city seemed to loom around her like a corporeal threat, glaring accusations straight through the brick walls.

"I thought you wanted to make things right," she countered weakly.

"We don't always get what we want," he replied matter-of-factly. Like the unspoken possibility of death, destruction and fear were merely a reality that had to be accepted. "Sometimes must be enough to settle for the privilege of choosing what we will keep and what we will lose. And there are very few things in this universe I am unwilling to cast into the flames in order to keep safe the few things I value above all else. If I must."

He shook his head, and she was surprised – and suspicious – to see a shade of pleading in his own expression. His voice was threaded with an earnest gravity, something she would almost be tempted to call a desperation. Begging her to understand, even though he refused to tell her what she wanted to know.

"But there is an excellent chance that no one has to lose anything else," he told her. "A chance that something can be salvaged. A chance that good can grow out of these evil days." He took a deep breath, leaning back slightly, as though casting off his impassioned heat, his face smoothing and cooling. "Yet, I say again, that is all up to you, my Jane. You are the key. I know it."

_How am I the key? _her mind raged. _Tell me what you mean by that! Tell me what you are trying to make me to do!_

"I'm not afraid of you," she hissed between clenched teeth. It wasn't exactly a lie. It wasn't exactly the truth either. But it felt important that she make him believe it.

Loki smiled broadly at her, eyes dancing with delight, as though she'd said something incredibly witty.

"Good," he said lightly, laughter invading his voice.

There was a pressure at the back of her eyes, a restless, frustrated energy that made her want to pace and bite her nails and _do _something. For some reason, she was acutely aware of the cold weight of the pendant around her neck. The rune that abhorred secrets and forced you onto new paths.

She glared up at the smug expression that was growing on his face at her conflict. He was enjoying this way too much.

"Loki…" she growled warningly.

Something flashed in his eyes. In an instant the amusement on his face gave way to something dangerous, hungry and straining at the bars of its cage.

"What?" he replied softly, his voice suddenly darkening with desire. He took a half step closer, all but eradicating the space between them. "What would you say to me, Jane, with my name on your lips?"

Jane felt the weight of his gaze burning along every nerve ending in her body and wanted to look away, but she refused to give him the satisfaction.

"I…"

She never found out what she would have said, because he reached up and traced the back of one finger along the line of her cheek bone, stealing her voice. Jane shivered, unconsciously turning her head into the touch, her protest dying on her lips. There was no spark of green lightning, no magical bite as punishment for the caress. She shouldn't have been able to feel it, because he wasn't really there. But warmth radiated from the point of contact, and she felt it again, that she was water, and his slightest touch had created ripples that spread over her entire body. Her lips tingled traitorously and she pressed them together into a hard line. He was too close. She knew she should step back, even if it meant retreat, but she felt like her feet had grown roots, like maybe she was just as caught and helpless as she had been the night before.

His eyes flicked down to the tight line of her mouth. Her heart hammered in her chest, but it didn't feel like fear. His gaze was like a physical touch, and a tremor ran through her when he swallowed hard and unconsciously darted the tip of his tongue to wet his lips. He leaned in closer, tilting his head slightly, almost thoughtfully. Jane, her senses buzzing and her mind inauspiciously blank, couldn't seem to find enough air in the space between their mouths. His eyes traveled down the line of her face and he brought his inexorably towards hers. Then down the line of her neck.

He stopped, bare millimeters away from her. Jane, her mind lost in a haze, had to arrest herself with a will of iron to stop herself from swaying forward to close the distance. Blinking, he raised his face away from her, looking suddenly uncertain. It sat strangely on his features. With an abruptness that left her feeling hollow and cold, he turned and walked a few steps away.

"Endearing as your obstinacy can be," he said quietly after a moment, "just this once, don't be stubborn. Use my gift. I'm not fool enough to believe your taking it will mean anything. I just can't bear to see you hurt."

Shaking her head, Jane reached up and ran a hand over her neck, and the bruise that had turned him aside. The bruise he had put there. The pain of the touch brought her back to reality. _What am I doing? _She clenched her jaw against her guilt and confusion. _What is he doing to me?_

"Oh really?" she asked snidely – or tried to, but there wasn't nearly as much venom in her voice as she had intended. Her voice sounded breathy and faint to her own ears. She barely knew what he was talking about, since she had no idea what the 'gift' was for, but letting him know it felt like it would tip the balance of power in his favor, and that was unacceptable when it was already so far out of balance. It was achingly apparent that he already had too much influence over her. "Even if you're the one that did it?"

He smirked sadly at her over his shoulder, his eyes full of craving and something like hopelessness. "Especially then."

He stepped back further still, and the invisible, shadowy fog, which had seemed to form a bubble around them as they spoke face to face, flowed into the gulf between them, obscuring him. The smile that animated his face as the darkness swallowed him was clear to her eyes nevertheless, because it was always clear in her memory. That same frustrating, irreverent, self-assured smile. The same smile as the first smile he'd ever given her. But his eyes, bright with cynical amusement, were tinged with a knowing sadness that made Jane's throat tighten with something that wasn't fear or anger or guilt.

"Remember, Jane. You are my rain. And I am counting on you."

Without further fanfare, the image of him disintegrated in a sizzle of green energy. The fog of shadows evaporated like morning mist, letting the weak sunlight pour back in through the windows. The ringing, which had reached so high a pitch that Jane had ceased to notice it, went suddenly still. A moment of thick silence reigned before both women sank onto the couch, gasping and trying to collect themselves. Alexa caught Jane's eye; hers were wide fear and wonder.

"I am sorry, Jane," Alexa breathed. "But I will not try that again."

"No problem," Jane replied, rubbing a hand over her face; she notices she could no longer feel the presence of the mark. Snatching up the mirror from the coffee table, she examined herself to see that it was no longer visible. But there was no doubt in her mind that it was still there. "I don't think I'd like to try that again either."

After a long moment, apparently at a loss for what more to do, Alexa poured them each another cup of tea.

"It seems Grandmother may have been right… "

"I'll say."

They sat quietly, sipping their tea.

"But he loves you, I think."

Jane looked at Alexa incredulously. Of all she could have said, that was possibly the last thing she'd expected to hear. It certainly wasn't the most important thing. It was immaterial, in fact.

Apparently Alexa didn't think so. She was watching Jane thoughtfully, expectantly.

"That's… not love," Jane muttered into her teacup after a moment, her cheeks going annoyingly pink. "That's stalking."

"Love may drive a man to extreme lengths," Alexa commented philosophically, holding her own teacup close to her face and closing her eyes as she let the steam waft under her nose. "Who knows how far it might drive a god?"

"Loki is _not _a god," Jane retorted. "And whatever you think, both you and your grandma said it: he's dangerous."

"Sometimes the reward is worth the danger; sometimes it is not. As I said, all my intention was to give you that choice."

Jane just shook her head and sipped her tea. What reward? Loki had nothing she wanted. _Nothing,_ she repeated sternly, stalwartly refusing to acknowledge the pull of her curiosity, or the tiny seed of disappointment she'd felt when his image had failed to kiss her. He was a complete wild card, and he wasn't just alive, or free, or nearby. He was literally under her skin, and she didn't know anything that could be done about it.

Jane reached up to finger the pendant hanging around her neck, the only thing standing between the two of them. Sighing in resignation, moved to pull it off.

"Keep it," Alexa said with a shake of her head.

"I… are you sure?" Jane asked, almost pathetically grateful. "He said…"

"The god said not to stand between you _again_. I cannot defy him. But just as the rune cannot undo the mark that was already upon you, that protection has already been given. I break no command by allowing you to keep what is already yours." She looked seriously at Jane. "Besides, I suspect you will need it."

Jane grimaced. "I don't understand any of this. Loki is supposed to be dead. I can't even imagine how he survived, much less…" She shook her head, at a loss to put into words the surreality of her situation.

"When the Trickster is nearby, nothing can ever be quite what it seems," Alexa said with quiet surety. Her face was still so pale it bordered on ashen, but her eyes were thoughtful. "You would do well to remember that, I think."

Jane swallowed hard, rubbing her free hand over her thigh to wipe the sweat from her palms. Her fingers moved over a bulge in one pocket, and she suddenly remembered the golden disc. Eager some distraction to occupy her mind, she pulled it from her pocket.

"I don't suppose you could tell me what this is?"

Alexa's eyes narrowed critically as they lit on the disc.

"This… is the gift he spoke of?"

Jane nodded. "It was on my dresser this morning. These symbols are runes, right? Do they say what this thing is for?"

Alexa bend her head close, studying the box thoughtfully. Frowning, she set aside her teacup.

"May I?"

Jane nodded again and put the disc in her outstretched hand. Alexa examined it closely.

"Here in the middle is _sowulo,_" she said, pointing to the largest symbol in the center of the disc. "For the sun. It means energy, movement, rejuvenation. But in this case, I think it means healing."

"Makes sense," Jane murmured, recalling Loki's entreaty for her to use his gift on her wound.

"I suspect…"

Alexa turned the disc sideways, examining it critically, then gripped it in both hands and twisted. There was a small sucking sound, and the disc split in half lengthwise. Inside, a thick, whitish ointment was caked in larger half. Not a disc then; a jar. Alexa sniffed it and blinked, looking down at the ointment wonderingly.

"I suspect this will heal you quite quickly if you apply it to your throat," she said, her voice hushed with awe. "I believe it is made from the apples of Idunn's garden." Jane shot her a questioning look. "Legend tells us that the apples that grow in the garden of Idunn on Asgard are what give the gods their strength and long life."

Jane cocked a skeptical eyebrow, but took the jar from Alexa's hand. The aroma of apples did indeed waft up from the ointment. It reminded her, suddenly and jarringly, of the scent of Loki's hair. A frisson of electricity shot through her and she quickly set it on the coffee table. _Smell is the sense most powerfully associated with memory, _she reminded herself logically. That didn't explain why she was remembering the sense of touch so vividly as well, but it didn't bear thinking about right now.

Taking up the hand mirror, she carefully dabbed a small amount of the ointment onto her little finger and, scolding herself internally for her own recklessness, dabbed the mystery substance onto a section of the bruise. She sucked in a sharp breath as an instant later a tingling burn started in the skin there, and drew the mirror up quickly to see what kind of reaction it had caused. To her patent astonishment, she watched the skin under the ointment seem to bubble and suck in the salve. Before her eyes, the area lightened, flushed red, and then paled back to her normal skin tone, leaving a patch of healthy, unmarked skin in the center of the bruise.

"That's… that's…" She couldn't find a word to sufficiently describe what it was. She refused to even think the word 'miraculous', but it was hard not to.

Barely able to make herself care that she was giving in to Loki's request and possibly giving him some completely undeserved peace of mind, she sparingly covered the rest of the bruise, gritting her teeth against the prickling burn. It wasn't for his sake, she told herself, staring in unblinking wonder as her skin roiled and cleared, like storm clouds rolling back to give way to clear skies; it was for her own comfort. Besides, she wanted the evidence of his violence and domination gone from her skin. It was already imprinted uncomfortably deep on her memory.

She made sure to use the least amount of the medicine possible. The rest, she had already decided, was destined for a series of microscope slides currently gathering dust in her lab in London. She began mentally listing the various tests she wanted to perform on her sample, mostly so she didn't have to think any more about the wound it had healed, or the man that had given it to her, when she over heard Alexa hum thoughtfully to herself.

"Strange…" Alexa muttered. She was still examining the lid of the jar.

"What?"

"Look here," she pointed to a repeating pattern that moved in a ring around the central symbol. "_Naudiz _and _gebo. _The two runes interlock and alternate."

"Okay…" Jane nodded. Then she shook her head. "Sorry, that means nothing to me. Explain. Please," she added belatedly.

Alexa glanced up at her and smiled wryly before looking back at the golden disc of the lid. She pointed to a symbol that looked like a crooked cross.

"_Naudiz_ is 'necessity'. A lack or dissatisfaction, an emptiness that needs to be filled. An imbalance between means and desire."

Her finger shifted to the next symbol, which resembled an 'x', linked on each end to the first symbol.

"_Gebo _is 'gift'. Its purpose is creating connections." She held up her index fingers side by side. "Two who were separate," she crossed her index fingers to form an 'x', "are joined where they meet in common purpose. They are bound together by the exchange of gifts, creating a debt that solidifies loyalty. _Gebo_ balances opposing forces with bonds of fidelity, converting enmity to allegiance. It is the seal placed upon oaths, treaties…" Alexa glanced up at Jane. "… marriages..." she looked away again. "Anything that formalizes a union of opposites."

Jane stared at where the two fingers crossed for a long moment before Alexa dropped her hands. It irritated her to realize she was blushing again, flustered without knowing why.

"_Use my gift. I'm not fool enough to believe your taking it will mean anything. I just can't bear to see you hurt."_

So he said. But Alexa was right. Nothing he said was ever quite what it seemed.

"The two runes are nearly opposites," Alexa continued, turning her attention back to the lid, "yet they compliment each other in unexpected ways. So unlike one another, yet juxtaposed like this, they fulfill each other. _Gebo _fills the emptiness of _naudiz_; while _naudiz _opens wide to receive and embrace the fullness of _gebo_. Balance and imbalance, balancing one another. The way they circle _sowulo_ gives the central rune for healing a much broader double meaning." She shrugged. "It is rather poetically crafted. It is simply a strange statement to be engraved upon a jar of medicine."

Jane stared at the knotted symbols as they took on weighty new significance. Trying to work through their possible implications. Analyzing what she knew with what she was learning. Letting new pieces of the puzzle slide into place.

He had tried to tie her to his crimes with declarations of love. Now he wanted to bind her with a gift of medicine to heal a wound he had made. Creating a 'debt', the runes said. Trying to create loyalty out of necessity.

_Is that it, Loki? _she mused critically, her internal voice quiet and analytical. _You want to force me into an alliance?_

She pursed her lips, tracing the thin thread of his logic, and losing the frayed end of it again and again.

_Why? _she wondered. _To what purpose? What necessity? Do you think dragging me down with you will somehow heal the damage you've done?_

_Or do you expect me to somehow lift you up?_

Impossible.

Memories from the Dark World slid in sideways again, complicating the comfortably black and white picture forming in her mind glittering facets of gray. Of a man who was more than just a faceless monster… of someone she couldn't just write off as 'better off dead'… someone who had saved her, protected her, impressed her… someone Thor had mourned, in spite of all the evil he'd done…

"_You are my rain…"_

Impossible! But even so, there was no question in her mind that that was the answer to the riddle written in the runes. She was left only to wonder whether it was a request, or a warning.

Half an hour later, the golden disc of medicine was back in Jane's pocket as Alexa walked her down to the street. The two had exchanged phone numbers – "just in case," they had agreed – but the tension between them had grown too intense to brook further delay of Jane's departure. There were just too many unknowns, and they remained virtual strangers. Time and distance were necessary now. Alexa looked tired and sad as she opened the door for Jane to step out.

"_Uruz,_" she said suddenly, glancing up at Jane's forehead as they faced each other across the threshold of the doorway. "Its meaning has become quite clear, yes?"

Jane gave her a weary, sidelong look.

"No," she contradicted morosely. She had a few new answers, yes, but about a million more questions. Add the curiosity, the confusion, fascination and revulsion distracting her from what little logic she could find to analyzed, the vague threats and even vaguer hopes... There was absolutely nothing clear about this at all. "I still don't know what any of this means." She shrugged dejectedly. "Care to enlighten me?"

Alexa's eyebrows lifted quizzically, surprised. "You don't see it?" When Jane shook her head, Alexa cocked hers to the side, as though puzzled. Her eyes were worried. "How little we see ourselves," she murmured.

She reached out towards Jane, paused, then laid her hand gently on Jane's arm. Her touch was delicate, but Jane could feel her hand through her sleeve as though the fabric was not there, and her skin tingled with a weight in the touch that wasn't physically there. Jane looked up at her questioningly; the contact was simple, but somehow it was fraught with more meaning than Jane could grasp. When Alexa spoke, her accent was thicker, and her eyes were distant and filled with some heavy emotion that said perhaps she felt it too.

"The god… Loki… is driven by _uruz." _ She shook her head, and squeezed Jane's arm, little prickles of sensation radiating from her fingers up towards her shoulder. "He has marked _you_ as _uruz, _Jane. Because… it is you. You are his inspiration. His sickness. And his cure. You will be the rain that cools his fury. Or…" a shadow of fear flitted through her eyes. "Or you will be the fire that inflames him to incinerate everything."

The sky overhead rumbled ominously; the clouds were beginning to thicken again for another storm.

"What am I supposed to do?" Jane hated how small her voice sounded in the space between them.

Alexa lifted her hand off of Jane's shoulder. Jane blinked rapidly, and took a deep breath, as though she had forgotten the need before. She felt momentarily light-headed. She felt strangely as though she had forgotten something, but she didn't know what it was.

"I wish I could guide you." Alexa shook her head apologetically. "But I suspect you must choose your own way from here. Good luck, Jane Foster," she moved to close the door, then paused, casting her eyes up at the shells of the buildings and back down to Jane. "Yes, Grandmother was right. He is dangerous. But…" she bit her lip, eyes narrowing in thought. "…he may also be more than that." She looked back at Jane, hard in the eye. "And… so might you. Consider carefully. There are many ways up the mountain."

Then she smiled goodbye, and closed the door. Jane stood there staring at it for a long time, tracing the painted wood grain with her eyes as though she could read some kind of sense or answer in the pattern.

Was Alexa right? To Loki, she was _uruz_? The beast. The rain. The sickness and the cure.

_The beast… or the rain… _One or the other. Jane's brow furrowed.

"_Everything depends on you," _he had said.

"Why did you tell me all of that last night?" she asked the empty air.

Not just because she had changed the rules. Not just because he wanted confession or absolution.

_Why say so much, why _ask_ if I understood, then choke me unconscious before I could respond?_

_Why leave medicine rather than applying it himself, if the sight of the wound was so unbearable to him?_

_Why taunt me by refusing to answer my questions, but leave me clues, tempt me with a mystery, and tell me to search for the answers myself?_

_Why leave me here, free to tell his secrets, but deliver an ultimatum and ask me not to? _

Understanding struck like lightening out of a clear sky.

"So that I have to _choose_."

Not to give her a choice, as Alexa had done. To _force _her to choose.

The beast. Or the rain.

To oppose him. Or to cooperate with him.

He didn't want to _force _her into an alliance. He wanted her to choose an alliance with him of her own free will.

Runic symbols seemed to flash and dance around her head in a whirlwind as her analytical mind snapped them up and dissected the past hours along their esoteric edges.

_To create a shared guilt. A debt of loyalty. To fill his 'need' with a 'gift'. Or to fill mine… Not just to make an alliance in word, but to have me to share his guilt, of my own free will, so that we are equally complicit, share an equal stake in success or failure…_ A true union of opposites, just as Alexa had said.

The mark of _uruz_ tingled on her forehead again.

"The rain, or the fire? That's the choice?"

There was no response, of course.

There was no possible way. He was asking her to make herself his willing hostage. To hand herself over into blackmail, betray the people she cared about, risk more than she could even begin to imagine, and for something he had barely even begun to qualify to her. Asking her to trust him without giving her any reason to do so. And for what?

_Healing._

The mystery of _suwolo,_ the healing sun, tempted and troubled her, left like some juicy bait under a sign that read "this is a trap" in flashing neon letters. Only a fool would take it.

But Jane wanted to know, needed to understand, could not help but wonder: how did Loki imagine that her choices or her help could heal what he had broken?

It didn't seem possible, or fathomable, or sane. The broken city towered above her. What could she do to balance this kind of pain?

But if she really could…

"_Sometimes the reward is worth the danger.._." Alexa's words rang in her ears.

Jane was suddenly brought up short. Something Alexa had said…

"_I wish you well, Jane Foster."_

"I never told you my name…"

Even Loki had only said 'Jane'. How did Alexa know her surname?

"_Baldur was far-seeing." _

The length of the encounter raced through her mind, and it suddenly occurred to Jane to wonder what other attributes Alexa had inherited from her ancestors.

Far-seeing?

"Or…" Jane drew in a breath, no longer bothering to feel embarrassed over her superstitious thoughts. "...precognizant?"

"She is wise."

Jane gasped and turned to the deep, thickly accented voice behind her. The burly man with the unibrow had locked up the cart, closing its shutters and securing it to a nearby lamp post with a heavy chain. Jane saw a number of runic symbols etched into the metal frame, and had no doubt whatsoever that the locks were mere formality next to the other forms of theft protection the Solbergs had put in place around their property. The man moved past her to the door.

"If she tell you something, you are fool if not to listen." He looked up at her forehead, and Jane knew he was another who could see her mark. "She knows much." He looked back into her eyes. "She knows."

Then he moved past her and pushed through the door, closing it behind him. She heard a lock slide into place somewhere beyond.

Jane craned her neck to stare up at the grimy row of second story windows, her eyes wide, unable to quite believe the ideas she was entertaining and willing the truth to present itself.

When nothing more was forthcoming, Jane bit her lip, at war with herself.

Alexa seemed to believe she should give Loki a chance. How much faith should she put in this stranger's advice? Even if she was… Jane shook her head.

Every instinct and rational thought urged her against it. But something more, something deeper than thought or fear, whispered to her that maybe, just maybe…

She pulled the gold disc from her pocket, tracing the runes with her eyes. _Need_, _gift_ and _healing_ stared back at her, taunting her with their blatant double meanings, and stalwartly guarding their maker's secrets.

"Healing… Are you asking, Loki?" she murmured. "Or offering? Which is it?"

Again, no answer. She sighed, nodding slowly. That was alright. Loki was right about one thing. Frustrating as it could sometimes be, Jane was a scientist; she knew that answers didn't always offer themselves up. Sometimes they had to be hunted down. And despite the ramifications of the chase, in her heart of hearts, she wouldn't have it any other way.

Even so, she shivered to think how deep in the dark she remained. Her path forward to find new answers was lost to her, and she was standing at the edge of deep, lightless waters, about to leap into them without knowing how far she would have to swim to reach the other side. Or what monsters lurked beneath.

She turned her face up the street, towards where Stark Tower loomed above the ragged skyline. Towards help and protection. That was the right way. The safe way. The sane way. She stared down that path for a long time.

"…_are you so eager to burn another world with me, Jane?"_

She turned around and set off in the opposite direction, preparing herself to try to argue away the fee she'd no doubt accrued for missing checkout time hotel.

The burned out windows seemed to watch her from above like the hollow sockets of fleshless skulls, the broken buildings thrusting up into the sky like jagged teeth of a cadaver's leer. The wind swept down around her, like icy breath from death's head, howling and mocking her ignorance. Accusing her of treachery. Crowing at her daring. Cackling at her squeamishness as she kept her eyes firmly on the pavement in front of her.

_I didn't do this. He chose to do this. It doesn't matter why. It doesn't._

But she still couldn't look up at the city. She squeezed the gold disc, the rune for the healing sun pressing into her palm, and prayed to whoever was listening that she wasn't making a terrible mistake.

"…_you and I burned this world together. We two alone in all the realms share this guilt. And the part of you that is broken by that truth will always belong to me…"_

The sky rumbled again. The first cool drop of the next storm splashed against her forehead, and Jane sped up her steps, hoping to avoid the rain. If she could.

.

* * *

**End Part I  
TBC in Part II:  
Mark of the Beast  
.**

* * *

**AN**: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." [Lao Tzu] Jane just took the first step on her journey. I wonder if she is headed in the right direction? Only one way to find out…

In an earlier version of this fic, this is where the story ended. Fortunately, as I may have mentioned, my muse has no self-control, and created a much more complex tale that will take rather a bit longer to tell. So this is merely the end of the first part. Each part will be posted separately, mostly due to stylistic differences in the story-telling. So far this story has five parts in total, though more may arise – who knows what that drunken monkey will do next?

As such, if you have enjoyed the story, please look out for subsequent titles to be published in the very near future!

A reminder: the runes referenced in this story are based on real runic meanings, but some aspects may be embellished or uniquely interpreted for the purposes of this story.

Please remember, if you have not yet done so, to take a look at the beautiful fanart by Selene that inspired this fic; the link to it is on my profile page.

If you want to tease yourself for the next section of the story, go listen to the song _A Dangerous Mind_ by Within Temptation; it is what I have been listening to while writing Part II. Much like _Carnival of Rust_ was the theme for the first part of the story, that song is the theme for the next part.

Please let me know your thoughts! It's been a long couple of weeks, my inspiration has been a bit smothered with real world concerns, so I could really use a boost to my creative juices (aka, vodka for the monkey) from any comments or suggestions you might like to share. As always, feel free to ask questions if you have them as well!

Thank you so much for reading this far! See you soon, in Part II: _Mark of the Beast_!


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